Fires - Softcover

Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir of his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor, John gardner, and a title essay about the influences on his writing life; fifty poems and seven stories, including three from the earlier collection Furious Seasons. Of himself, carver wrote- "I began as a poet. My first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short-story writer - and occasional essayist'. In that order." Amongst many other pleasures it gives, this collection shows why.

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.