I forgot to write this on Friday, but "Happy Birthday, New Wave!" :)

(B) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver, 1981) Grade: A
My first introduction to Raymond Carver was probably the foreword he wrote for "On Being a Novelist," a book by John Gardner, a tutor of Carver's who had told him "to use 15 words instead of 25." This brevity works, and there is little, if any, fat in these short stories. Carver is efficient in bringing the reader into the moment, into his characters' lives, and then just as swiftly ending the story. The title story was my favorite, and interestingly, it was not published as Carver had originally written. You can read the original version at The New Yorker. The other original short stories from this collection are available in a book from Library of America.