What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

By: Raymond Carver

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Raymond Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one's way through the dark.

©1981 Raymond Carver (P)2017 Tantor

Classic shorts

These are my most favorite short stories to listen to again and again. Carver is a brilliant and talented writer.

This book really captures the nuances of love.

The stories and conversations are beautiful examples of love, lust, and loss. I enjoyed listening to them, and everyone can relate to at least once of them!

My God These Are Depressing

The performance was fine and these are good examples of literature of their time. But they are almost all just drenched in despair. Apparently love is inconsiderate and dead end and consistently disappointing. No wonder the divorce rate was so high in the 70s.

Bleak but unflinchingly honest.

Testimonial-like tales of murder, failed love, & alcoholism.
This collection contains one of Carver's best stories, So Much Water So Close To Home.
I found I prefer reading Carver to listening to Dietz's reading. Though Dietz excels at novels with a rural feel, and Carver's stories have fishermen, hunters, and the like, there's more bitterness and despair in the writing than comes across in Dietz's vocal performance.

Fabulous stories, writing and performance

What a great treat. Thank you Raymond Carver, and whatever sacrifices you had to make to get this written and published.

Great stories, awful performance

I love Raymond Carver -- his stories are quiet yet heartbreaking and powerful. But Norman Dietz's flat, robotic performance ruins this anthology. I'm disappointed that he was chosen to read all of Carver's work, as I would have liked to hear these stories narrated by someone who understands the material and has much more life in their voice.

Masterful

There's a reason Carver is considered the master of the literary short form. These stories are simply as real and human as it gets. Each one paints a complete picture of a life in the simplest of terms, and cuts to the bones of the human experience. Heart rending and powerful. Beautiful and blunt.

Fantastic

I actually think the narrator does a good job of reflecting the tone of these stories. All of these are fantastic short stories by one of the very best.

Awful narration.

Carver deserves better than this awful lifeless monotone narrator. It's a shame that he narrates all of his books.

Much Ado About Nothing

I thought that it was Norman Dietz's crusty, monotone narration which made me dispirited when I listened to Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," but as I listened to the stories' sudden drop endings over and over again, I discovered that it was the stories themselves. They are slices of ordinariness, vignettes of character and dialogue that do not go any where. Carver is highly skilled at capturing the voices of America in the center of the country and not on the coasts. These are people who smoke, drink, fish, and hunt. Their attitude toward women and women's attitude towards themselves reflect a specific place and time that has not aged this collection well. The characters have a different rhythm and sensibility as evidenced in their long-winding conversations. This frustrated a city guy such as me who wanted the stories to go, go, go somewhere and to be about something instead of nothing. But as Carver shows, there is nuance, passion, disappointment, hope, and fear in the nothingness. He works all of the shades of gray.