What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
9mentions
8people
2015–2025years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year)
Fiction:
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
- Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
- Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton
- Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips
Nonfiction:
- Exiles by Preston Sprinkle
- Jesus and the Powers by N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird
- With All Its Teeth by Joshua S. Porter
- In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
- A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
Copenhagen(play) by Michael Frayn done by BBC Radio, not really a book, but it's great. https://archive.org/details/michael-frayn-copenhagen
- Interesting use of Raymond Carver’s short story title “What we talk about when we talk about love”, which was also the background play in Birdman. If you haven’t read any Carver, treat yoself.
- I made a flippant comment during book club about how short stories are nothing compared to novels. A friend suggested I check out Raymond Carver which blew my mind.
His prose is one of a kind and his stories usually leave me floored.
I recommend the collection, "What we talk about when we talk about love" (the title of one story) -- which, by the way, is the play central to the (excellent) movie Birdman.
Man, typing this got me excited. Think I'm gonna pour a glass of Teacher's and see if anyone wants to dance.
- I just finished up Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari -- which, while not groundbreaking, was supremely interesting and readable. If you like Aziz's standup, it's basically him playing sociologist for 200 pages.
Right now I'm going back and forth between Black Hat Python (because I owe it to myself to at least learn a little bit of this stuff) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Carver. Two totally separate ends of the spectrum, but they're both great.
- Is the title an intentional mirror of Carver's short story collection "What we talk about when we talk about love"? If so, can someone smarter than me explain what the author means by this connection?
- Hmm, no credit to Haruki Murakami, who wrote the memoir of the title you yanked “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”?
Murakami credited Raymond Carver's collection of short stories called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” for inspiring his title. Might be nice for you to include a small mention.
