Tuesday, January 26, 7:30 p.m.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life  BUY NOW

Tobias Wolff will join Carol to read a story written by Carver

Raymond Carver was the most beloved American short-story writer of the late twentieth century. Two decades after his death, this definitive biography tells the story of Carver's uncanny ambition, legendary life, and enduring work.

When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the Times of London said, "the Chekhov of middle America." His influence on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has been widely noted. Not so generally known are how Carver became a writer, how he suffered to achieve his art, and how his troubled and remarkable personality affected those around him. 

Sklenicka's meticulous and absorbing biography re-creates Carver's early years in Yakima, Washington. She draws on hundreds of interviews with people who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and private collections, and all of Carver's poems and stories for Raymond Carver, which took ten years to write. 

Photo Credit: R.M. Ryan