A Small, Good Thing

"In 1983, Granta famously labeled him, along with contemporaries such as Ford and Wolff, 'dirty realists'; six years later, Tom Wolfe derided them as 'K-Mart realists' in Harper's. The idea is that there's something less than artful about their fiction, that their stories are unformed, anecdotal slices-of-life. But that's not true, any more than it's true that in editing 'What We Talk About,' Lish eclipsed its authenticity, effacing Carver's voice while recasting the book, somehow, as his own."

David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times reviews the publication by the Library of America of Raymond Carver's Collected Stories.