First published in 1981, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is the collection that made Raymond Carver the defining voice of American literary minimalism. Across seventeen spare, unsparing stories, Carver turns his attention to ordinary working-class lives — waitresses, salesmen, unemployed husbands, couples worn thin — and the moments when the surface of a marriage or a friendship suddenly gives way.
His people drink, argue, drift, and try to explain themselves, often failing. In the celebrated title story, two couples sit at a kitchen table over a bottle of gin and try, with increasing unease, to say what love actually is. Elsewhere a man watches his old life dismantled on a neighbor's lawn, or a couple fights over a baby until something breaks. Very little is spelled out; the meaning lives in what is withheld.
Pared to the bone (famously with the heavy hand of editor Gordon Lish), these stories are quiet, bleak, and deceptively simple — a landmark of the short-story form and of the "dirty realism" that shaped a generation of American writing.