from The New York Review of Books

The Two Raymond Carvers
Giles Harvey

The editors of the new Library of America edition of Carver’s Collected Stories made the decision to include the manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the book that established his reputation, under the title Beginners. Beginners is twice as long, and about half as interesting. One can’t help but wonder whether the Library of America would be republishing Carver now if it had been this version of the book, and not the one pruned and scoured by his editor, Gordon Lish, that had appeared in 1981.