Will You Please Be Quiet, Please

Raymond Carver was a poet and a short story writer. What an amazing title, short story writer. Also amazing is that he had two kids by the time he was twenty years old. He married when he was nineteen, his wife was sixteen. Today that would be called an accident. He started writing in his twenties, studied under John Gardner, who wrote The Art of Living and Other Stories.

This book here was Carver's first published short story collection. It appeared in 1976 and holds twenty-two little scenes depicting couples and families in everyday life situations. The interaction - not only in dialogue - between the characters is significant. I liked the things he chose to describe, more than the level of detail. After all, his writing changed the American short story.