--- product_id: 4536358 title: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)" price: "€ 27.94" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.pt/products/4536358-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-stories store_origin: PT region: Portugal --- # What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) **Price:** € 27.94 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - **How much does it cost?** € 27.94 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.pt](https://www.desertcart.pt/products/4536358-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-stories) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” ( The New York Review of Books )—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." — The New York Times Book Review Review: This is one of the finest collections of short stories published, by a masterful story teller. - I read a lot of novels, but I always on the lookout for good collections of short stories. This book might be the single best collection of short stories I have ever read. First off, Raymond Carver is one of the best short story writers there is. He is well known his spare style of writing. And because he takes on real life situations, love, alcoholism, dysfunctional relationships, uncomfortable things that many of us deal with, his spare style captures the type of stories he writes in a powerful way. The title story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is a touching and thought provoking story. Two couples, best friends, have a deep discussion about what love is, or isn’t. The one lady is telling how she was in an abusive relationship. It was bad. And her current husband, who she really loves, is saying how horrible her former lover was. But the lady makes an fascinating point, that although it was not a healthy relationship, it was still love. Her husband disagrees. How can an abusive relationship be love? The two couples are charming and you feel like you are sitting down with them, right in the middle of the conversation. And Carver shows you what healthy love is by the wonderful relationship of these two couples, while also showing you how unclear love can be, through the discussion they are having. It’s a masterpiece. The stories are varied. The Calm is a story at a barbershop. The Third Thing That Killed My Father is a twisted story about circumstances that ultimately do someone in. His father, being callus and looking out for his own interests, and how he didn’t anticipate what it would lead to. After The Denim, is a nice older couple who like to play Bingo and Carver does an amazing job showing the sweet little things, the things people get obsessively annoyed about to the point of letting it ruin a nice evening. Then there’s the unsettling story of Tell The Women We’re Going. The Bath is a sad but true to life tale of how two parents deal with a sudden tragedy, and the disbelief and denial and ways people distract themselves to try to deal with it. This collection run the gamut of sweet to creepy to the strange little everyday things that people make important. And Carver is masterful at telling these things in a way that makes you fascinated with the simple things people do, or the way people complicate their own lives with things we all do. Review: Good book - She was introduced to me as a cardiologist so I said oh one of my favorite stories is told by a cardiologist. That meant nothing to her so I resolved to buy her What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and for the moment moved on to Rorie Childers, professor of cardiology at the University of Chicago for what fifty years now, grandson of the revolutionary, son of the president, and told the physician some of his Brendan Behan stories. You don't have to know who Brendan was to enjoy them. Brendan was a fountain of stories long before he wrote a word. I can also sing Mountains of Mourne, Kathleen Mulvany, and the Parting Glass but we didn't get that far into my stage Irish act. I liked her so I did order the book the next day. I noticed on desertcart that the story had become a great work since its editor suggested I read it when the collection came out in 1981. He was my teacher. Thinking back on reading Raymond Carver that way reminds me of Harvard Knowles typing out poems and stories to mimeograph for us in the fall of 1978. I.A. Richards had done that at one of the old British universities early in the twentieth century, reporting the written reactions of his students to these anonymized works in his Practical Criticism. The critical situation is so pure. "I offer this work to your attention. What do you think of it? What support for your view can you offer from the document which we all have in our hands?" What Harvard was teaching us, by the way, is a social practice by which this country is governed. We were not writing students. Anyways. For thirty years now writing students in the United States have already known that Raymond Carver is something else. Many even have opinions about Gordon, his editor, my teacher, who got Ray across to a large paying public. I missed all that, got to just read what he had to say. I thirteen years later recited the first paragraph of What We Talk About to the assembled staff of the Literature Publishing House in their offices in the stable behind the Ha Noi mansion they had rented out to a photo developer. As I have got to know the novelist David Willson more and more over decades we have shared our common roots in Yakima, where both David and Ray are from and where my brothers and I and a great deal of the world picked fruit. I once found Yakima in common between me and an Indian man I happened to walk out of the same Manhattan apartment house with to the subway. Anyways. "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right". ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #24,624 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #171 in Short Stories Anthologies #337 in Short Stories (Books) #379 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction | | Customer Reviews | 4.3 out of 5 stars 3,091 Reviews | ## Images ![What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81ccTJ4APmL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is one of the finest collections of short stories published, by a masterful story teller. *by M***H on March 2, 2019* I read a lot of novels, but I always on the lookout for good collections of short stories. This book might be the single best collection of short stories I have ever read. First off, Raymond Carver is one of the best short story writers there is. He is well known his spare style of writing. And because he takes on real life situations, love, alcoholism, dysfunctional relationships, uncomfortable things that many of us deal with, his spare style captures the type of stories he writes in a powerful way. The title story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is a touching and thought provoking story. Two couples, best friends, have a deep discussion about what love is, or isn’t. The one lady is telling how she was in an abusive relationship. It was bad. And her current husband, who she really loves, is saying how horrible her former lover was. But the lady makes an fascinating point, that although it was not a healthy relationship, it was still love. Her husband disagrees. How can an abusive relationship be love? The two couples are charming and you feel like you are sitting down with them, right in the middle of the conversation. And Carver shows you what healthy love is by the wonderful relationship of these two couples, while also showing you how unclear love can be, through the discussion they are having. It’s a masterpiece. The stories are varied. The Calm is a story at a barbershop. The Third Thing That Killed My Father is a twisted story about circumstances that ultimately do someone in. His father, being callus and looking out for his own interests, and how he didn’t anticipate what it would lead to. After The Denim, is a nice older couple who like to play Bingo and Carver does an amazing job showing the sweet little things, the things people get obsessively annoyed about to the point of letting it ruin a nice evening. Then there’s the unsettling story of Tell The Women We’re Going. The Bath is a sad but true to life tale of how two parents deal with a sudden tragedy, and the disbelief and denial and ways people distract themselves to try to deal with it. This collection run the gamut of sweet to creepy to the strange little everyday things that people make important. And Carver is masterful at telling these things in a way that makes you fascinated with the simple things people do, or the way people complicate their own lives with things we all do. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Good book *by D***Y on March 26, 2014* She was introduced to me as a cardiologist so I said oh one of my favorite stories is told by a cardiologist. That meant nothing to her so I resolved to buy her What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and for the moment moved on to Rorie Childers, professor of cardiology at the University of Chicago for what fifty years now, grandson of the revolutionary, son of the president, and told the physician some of his Brendan Behan stories. You don't have to know who Brendan was to enjoy them. Brendan was a fountain of stories long before he wrote a word. I can also sing Mountains of Mourne, Kathleen Mulvany, and the Parting Glass but we didn't get that far into my stage Irish act. I liked her so I did order the book the next day. I noticed on Amazon that the story had become a great work since its editor suggested I read it when the collection came out in 1981. He was my teacher. Thinking back on reading Raymond Carver that way reminds me of Harvard Knowles typing out poems and stories to mimeograph for us in the fall of 1978. I.A. Richards had done that at one of the old British universities early in the twentieth century, reporting the written reactions of his students to these anonymized works in his Practical Criticism. The critical situation is so pure. "I offer this work to your attention. What do you think of it? What support for your view can you offer from the document which we all have in our hands?" What Harvard was teaching us, by the way, is a social practice by which this country is governed. We were not writing students. Anyways. For thirty years now writing students in the United States have already known that Raymond Carver is something else. Many even have opinions about Gordon, his editor, my teacher, who got Ray across to a large paying public. I missed all that, got to just read what he had to say. I thirteen years later recited the first paragraph of What We Talk About to the assembled staff of the Literature Publishing House in their offices in the stable behind the Ha Noi mansion they had rented out to a photo developer. As I have got to know the novelist David Willson more and more over decades we have shared our common roots in Yakima, where both David and Ray are from and where my brothers and I and a great deal of the world picked fruit. I once found Yakima in common between me and an Indian man I happened to walk out of the same Manhattan apartment house with to the subway. Anyways. "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right". ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Master of short sad stories *by B***D on October 4, 2015* If you like stories where something happens, characters find fullfillment, love and success, characters talk things out and get somewhere----this book is not for you. I like those books, but I like this too---in certain moods, usually when I'm taking things a little on the dark side. Carver is a master short story writer, but these are minimalist, very sad stories about people at the end of some tether or other. I can only read a few a night, and often reread them so I can stop reading for the action and read for Mr. Carver's beautiful language. Especially interesting is the title story, what we talk about etc. In the story two couples sit down and start talking about love. One of the women talks alot about her ex-boyfriend, an abusive guy who she couldn't seem to stay away from. They're drinking, of course---de rigeur and the source of most trouble in Carver stories. They talk and drink, and as they talk, the rooms darkens---but nobody turns on the lights. I think it's a metaphor for how we live. Nothing is easy. We can color love with all kinds of pretty hearts and flowers colors, but it's really hard to keep that bright outlook in the face of what it takes to love somebody, every day, the right way. If you've been happily married for 30 years, this probably won't mean alot to you. But for the many people who have experience with creating their own misery at some length, it can be a resonant read. I wouldn't know anything about that, of course...... Not for everyone, but pretty darn good. ## Frequently Bought Together - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories - Cathedral - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.pt/products/4536358-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-stories](https://www.desertcart.pt/products/4536358-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-love-stories) --- *Product available on Desertcart Portugal* *Store origin: PT* *Last updated: 2026-06-18*