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“... Roth tells him he should stick to fiction rather than films because of his verbal precision; Raymond Carver appears at Bill Buford’s for dinner; Claire Bloom has a passing and unjustified role). If there’s an excuse for the name-dropping, it’s Kureishi’s belief that a writer must have an intelligent and involved audience, something his ...”

“... to Egypt). The people are just ordinarily strange – very much the kind described by Raymond Carver in the introductory essay he wrote for his 1986 selection of Best American Short Stories (which featured a story by Simpson): ‘Real people’ in the guise of fictional characters inhabit the stories ... The characters ... are people ...”

“... closely to the realist conventions of the American short story as handed down from Hemingway to Raymond Carver to half a million creative writing graduate students, Proulx’s stories have clear and acknowledged roots in folk tales, oral traditions and local legend. She understands that true stories don’t simply spring from the stony ground of ...”

“... and some, like Lutz, cult figures, who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised ...”

“... lives (divorcees, scandal-hounded celebrities, relocated workers), they lived low-budget, Raymond Carver lives. Still, there were moments when more attention might have been paid to them. The hijackers drove without proper licences, violated immigration rules, left a plane sitting on an active runway and developed the unmarketable skill of ...”

“... There is a beguiling poem by Raymond Carver which, like many modern poems, though more cheerfully than some, spends most of its short life mulling over the conditions of its own possibility. ‘A crow flew into the tree outside my window’: the ingenuous opening line at once establishes Carver in a realm of the purest contingency, where things just happen to happen ...”

“... resulted in his failure to include even a single story written in the Postmodern manner. Raymond Carver, to whom the volume was dedicated, was the anthology’s presiding deity, and the stories that made Wolff’s cut, like those for which Carver was famous, tended to highlight the fraught domestic dynamics of ...”

“... the early 1970s Johnson did an MFA at the University of Iowa and came under the influence of Raymond Carver, who had yet to receive his late acclaim and was still in full-blown drinking mode. Johnson followed suit – going, as he put it, ‘from prodigy to prodigal in a hurry’. (His first collection of poetry, The Man among the Seals, had ...”

“... them.) It uses the voice of a disgruntled, detached Tokyo hipster, self-raised on Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky, to tell an unlikely noir story: a nameless Boku goes in search of an old friend and a mysterious sheep on the orders of a shadowy tycoon. It’s a consciously Chandleresque set-up, which, in Murakami’s words, ‘meant, first of ...”

“... Walser, pays tribute to Kathy Acker and boasts of not having read or even seen a single book by Raymond Carver. Tristram Shandy and The Pickwick Papers are said to be better than the complete works of Faulkner and Burroughs, and there are many discussions of George Eliot. At the same time, in her role as a mock-translator, she improvises a consciously ...”

“... unproductive, to discuss such things unless, to borrow a formulation from the ‘realist’ writer Raymond Carver, we first ask what we talk about when we talk about the real. Perhaps we should have another look at the terms ‘the real’, ‘reality’ and ‘realism’. Let’s start with ‘realism’, since it’s the easiest target of the ...”

“... stories justify the comparisons made by his admirers: most pertinently, to John Cheever and Raymond Carver (Yates falls somewhere in between). But when Yates’s stories are encountered en masse – this new edition brings together his two collections and nine previously uncollected pieces – the uniformity of experience described begins to ...”

“... the Dirty Realism of the early Eighties, a term whose sole raison d’être seemed to be to place Raymond Carver in a marketable context; or the Brat Pack writers of the late Eighties, whose three ‘founders’, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, remain its only viable practitioners; or the so-called New Narrativists of the first half ...”

“... and warmth in sight.Atticus’s father, the celebrated editor Gordon Lish, specialised in cutting Raymond Carver’s stories, sometimes ending them thousands of words earlier than originally written. Eloquent truncation, with the implications left to reverberate, can be a very powerful effect. There were traces of ...”

“... as ‘minor but pernicious’ lies of literature. A failed writer, he still subscribes to Raymond Carver’s ‘No tricks’ as stubbornly as an alumnus of Granta’s ‘Dirty Realism’ issue. In his view, even ‘Joyce’s epiphanies’ are ‘a good example of falsehood’: ‘The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ...”