Beginners Tim O-Brien once said of Raymond Carver, -He uses the English language like a whittler-s knife, carving stark and unadorned prose-objects, paring away everything but the very core of human emotion.'Beginners is Carver-s most famous collection of short stories - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - before this whittling proc... more »ess had begun. It is the unedited version of the masterpiece which would be cut by almost fifty per cent by Carver-s editor and mentor, Gordon Lish, before its original publication in 1981 and which would go on to become one of the most influential pieces of modern literature.Carver-s preoccupation with the marrow of things is just as present in these longer stories. A young girl, dancing with her lover amidst the debris of an older man-s life, has her first forewarning of the dangers of adulthood, and is filled with an -unbearable happiness-. A man and woman lock themselves in a motel room and slowly, painfully, acknowledge the end of a relationship, while somewhere else in the lonely Midwest a man is photographed over and over again as he attempts to locate himself in a world that seems utterly without focus. But as we move through the manifold little tragedies at the heart of the ordinary - so much at the core of Carver-s work - new layers, new nuances, new meanings reveal themselves.Where the Lish / Carver collaboration cut this collection to the -linguistic bone-, these fleshier stories say what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long. Beginners is a fascinating insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural debates of our times.« less