Raymond Carver: Another Kind of Minimalism

Actually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word “Minimalism” as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and ’80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week’s Time I took a detour from my art and architecture duties to talk about a new account of Carver’s hard-drinking, hardscrabble life and the new edition of his collected stories just issued by the Library of America. Alot of those stories may be downers, but they’re also what you might call can’t put ‘em downers.