Her sonâ€™s knocked down and killed by a car the day of the birthday. A woman orders a cake for her sonâ€™s seventh birthday party. The weakest story is A Small, Good Thing. The story deals with some issues he has to face including trying to find a decent baby-sitter and the awkwardness and resentment between him and his ex-wife and her lover.

A man is struggling to get his life back on track after his marriage ends. This story also made me feel really sad.įever is a fantastic story. He befriends a man whoâ€™s on the same boat and contemplates breaking up with his equally alcoholic and mostly useless girlfriend. In Where Iâ€™m Calling From, a man checks into a drying out house and tries to stop drinking. I thought the story offered a very realistic picture of the reality of working class people. The story contains some anecdotes of her marriage and the various girls whoâ€™ve worked for her over the years.

In Vitamins a woman builds up her own business selling, you guessed it, Vitamins door-to-door. Â Feathers made me laugh and sort of want to cry. A couple from the city go to have dinner with some friends who live in a big farm in the country who have a huge rooster as a pet. The strongest stories in the collection are Feathers, Vitamins, Where Iâ€™m Calling From and Fever. The tutor was fanatical about Carver and I caught some of his fever. I became a fan a few years ago when I did a Creative Writing class at Glasgow University. Iâ€™ve read all of Carverâ€™s collections. A further collection was published posthumously. It contains twelve stories including Cathedral, A Small, Good Thing, Where Iâ€™m Calling From and Vitamins. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver’s work to a more confidently poetic styleâ€¦Ĭathedral is the final collection of stories published by Carver before he died. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Raymond Carver said it was possible ‘to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power’.

Carver raymond cathedral