This is the study on Ray Carver I've been looking for. Excellent! Very smart, super smart, and still readable. A great aid for teaching Carver's fiction, or for writing about it, or for just understanding its intricacies, of which there are many, as Nesset demonstrates. Great book!

Thanks to Kirk Nesset for writing a study that's EXCITING TO READ even while thoughtful and smart and interpretively right on the money. Who said writing about writers and writing had to be boring? This is the book I've been wanting to find!

I've perused all of the critical work and this book outshines them all -- by at least 300 per cent. It's engaging, penetrating, well-developed and lucid, and written humanely no less, with much flair and elan. What a refreshing read, considering the arid critical deserts one often wanders. Nesset explores all of Carver's major volumes of stories, discussing selected stories in each while touching on others, and reflecting on Carver's poems here and there to good effect, using them as signposts and touchstones. If you've ever felt baffled by those bare, darkest stories, feel baffled no more. Carver's craft, his magic, is revealed in this book -- revealed from first page to last in that most illuminating, helpful, and respectful of ways.