The bibliography of Raymond Carver consists of 72 short stories, 306 poems, a novel fragment, a one-act play, a screenplay co-written with Tess Gallagher, and 32 pieces of non-fiction (essays, a meditation, introductions, and book reviews). In 2009 the 17 stories collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love were published in their manuscript form, prior to Gordon Lish's extensive editing, under the title Beginners.
Contents
Complete works
Raymond Carver's complete published works are collected in the following volumes:
Two texts which are not included in any of the collections above were published separately:
Poetry
Carver's 306 poems are collected in All Of Us (1996) after previously appearing in the collections: Near Klamath (1968), Winter Insomnia (1970), At Night The Salmon Move (1976), Fires (1983), Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985), This Water (1985), Ultramarine (1986), Early For The Dance (1986), Those Days: Early Writings By Raymond Carver: Eleven Poems And A Story (1987), In A Marine Light: Selected Poems (1987), A New Path To The Waterfall (1989), and No Heroics, Please (1991).
Notable poems include "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year", which grew out of the essay "My Father's Life", and "Gravy", which was published in The New Yorker in August 1988 following Carver's death. The poems "Late Fragment" and "Gravy" are both inscribed on his tombstone.
Other Works
Carver's first publication was in the Chico State student newspaper, The Wildcat, on October 31, 1958. His contribution was a letter to the editor entitled "Where Is Intellect?", which complained about the apathy of students on campus. In 1962, Carver wrote an absurdist one-act play entitled Carnations, which was staged on his college's campus on May 11 and received mostly negative feedback. The play was published in 1992 by Engdahl Typography.
A fragment of Carver's unfinished novel The Augustine Notebooks was published in Iowa Review (Summer 1979), and later collected in Call If You Need Me (2000) and Collected Stories (2009). Additionally, Carver had accepted an advance on an unwritten novel from McGraw-Hill and planned to write a novel he imagined as "an African Queen sort of thing" set in German East Africa after World War I. Carver later admitted he stopped working on the novel after two weeks, and it appears that nothing of it exists beyond the published fragment.
In 1982, Carver was approached by director Michael Cimino with the idea of reworking a screenplay on the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Carver asked Tess Gallagher to assist him in the project. The movie was never produced but the screenplay, entitled Dostoevsky, was published by Capra (Santa Barbara, 1985).
Editing
Carver served as the founding editor of the Chico State literary magazine Selection in 1960 and the UC Santa Cruz journal Quarry (later Quarry West) in 1971. He also edited the Spring 1963 issue of Toyon at Humboldt State. Carver also selected the contents for the book Syracuse Poems and Stories 1980 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Department of English, Syracuse University, 1980). He also selected, along with Shannon Ravenel, the stories included in The Best American Short Stories 1986 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986) and edited American Short Story Masterpieces (New York: Delacorte Press, 1987) with Tom Jenks.