Not Far From Here

Book excerpt: Hailed as the “American Chekhov” by the Times Literary Supplement, Raymond Carver is the most popular and influential American short-story writer since Ernest Hemingway. His works have been adapted to film and translated into more than twenty languages. Yet despite this international appeal, the critical attention to his writing has originated mostly in the US. In an attempt to expand the scope and range of Carver criticism, Not Far From Here: The Paris Symposium on Raymond Carver – based on papers delivered at the International Conference of the Raymond Carver Society at the University of Paris XII on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the author’s death – offers an engaging conversation by both emerging and established international scholars from France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the US. Literary studies, biographical studies, film theory, textual editing, intertextual analysis, cultural studies, feminism, semiotics, mythology, existentialism, metafictional analysis, representationalism, symbolism, humanism, and Lacanian criticism all have some presence in this collection of essays. Not Far From Here provides readers and scholars alike with new and multinational insights into Carver’s poetry and fiction.