He consistently reveals subtle, hidden connections that suggest refreshing new ways to approach the stories. Please? (1978), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1982), Cathedral (1984), and Where I'm Coming From: New and Collected Stories (1988)-explicating each story ad seriatim. Runyon focuses his discussion on four collections- Will You Please Be Quiet. But the collaboration his stories ask of the reader extends-and this is the thesis of my book-to the interstices between the stories as well.' Although many of the stories in Carver's collections were published previously in journals and magazines, Runyon argues that the specific order in which they appear in book form reveals a deliberate, consciously contrived pattern. 'In Carver there is a prevailing absence, a silence, an empty space between the lines that his texts invite us to fill. To make his case, Runyon coins the term 'intratextuality' to explain Carver's method of linking stories within a collection, creating a dependence upon and resonance among one another. As he insists, 'Carver is in fact a self-reflexive metafictional writer-not the practitioner of 'extrospective' fiction Barth takes him to be but an extremely introspective one.'

However much Runyon may aver, Carver's prose was minimalist, but as this study carefully reveals, it was not exclusively minimalist. Runyon is determined to free Carver from the label of minimalism, a label Carver denied for himself and which Runyon views as devaluative.

While so much of that literature is little more than warmed-over Hemingway and one writer's style indistinguishable from another, Carver distinguished himself as possessing a highly individual, original voice. Along with writers such a Donald Barthelme and Ann Beattie, Carver has been seen as a dominant figure of the minimalist movement.

When he died in 1988, Raymond Carver left behind a literary canon of five collections of fiction, three of poetry, and two other volumes of poems and stories-certainly not a prolific legacy but one that is among the most important in contemporary short fiction.

Carver collected stories