Carver - Beginners

but that is not the whole story.

R.C., Fat

B eginners is the original version of seventeen short stories written by Raymond Carver and published, in editorially altered form, as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Alfred A. Knopf in April 1981.

The source of this editionits base-textis the manuscript that Carver delivered to Gordon Lish, then his editor at Knopf, in the spring of 1980. That manuscript, which Lish cut by more than fifty percent in two rounds of close line editing, is preserved in the Lilly Library of Indiana University. Carvers original stories have been recovered by transcribing his typewritten words that lie beneath Lishs handwritten alterations and deletions.

For ease of comparison, and because Carver provided no table of contents, the sequence of the stories in Beginners parallels their sequence in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In both books the penultimate story, albeit in markedly different forms, gives the collection its title. In Carvers manuscript, that story is called Beginners (But it seems to me were just rank beginners at love). Having shortened Beginners by half, Lish adapted a line from elsewhere in Carvers text to yield the title What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for the story and the book.

Three months before taking his manuscript to New York City in May 1980, Carver wrote Lish that he had on hand three groups of stories. One group had previously appeared in little magazines or small-press books but had never been published by a major press. A second group either had appeared or were soon to appear in periodicals. A third group, by far the smallest, consisted of new stories still in typescript. These three groups of stories comprise Beginners.

In preparing the manuscript for Lishs editorial review, Carver made incidental changes to stories that had previously appeared in magazines or small-press books. These authorial revisions, including handwritten corrections, are preserved in Beginners. Obvious word omissions, misspellings, and inconsistencies in punctuation have been silently corrected. A brief publication history of each story is provided in the notes.

The restoration of Beginners has been the work of many years. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Lilly Library of Indiana University in providing access to the papers of Gordon Lish and the archives of Noel Youngs Capra Press. We warmly thank the staff of the Ohio State University Library, in particular Geoffrey D. Smith, head of Rare Books and Manuscripts, who has overseen the establishment of the Raymond Carver archive in the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction. For permission to reproduce Carvers writings, we thank the poet, essayist, and short story writer Tess Gallagher.

Raymond Carver dedicated What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to Tess Gallagher in 1981 with the promise that one day he would republish his stories at full length. His attempts to do so were cut short by his death, at age fifty, in 1988. Since then, we have pursued the restoration of Beginners with Ms. Gallaghers unwavering encouragement. It is to her that we dedicate the outcome of our efforts.

W ILLIAM L. S TULL

M AUREEN P. C ARROLL

University of Hartford

West Hartford, Connecticut

18 May 2009