1. A term for adult education. 2. Schools for working people, held in the evening after the end of the working day. There were very early examples of this, eg the Danish Education Act of 1814 imposed a responsibility upon the government to arrange...

1. Term for adult education. 2. School for adults in the evening, after the working...

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, published in 1976, was the first short-story collection by American writer Raymond Carver. This minimalist collection revolves around themes of segregation and disenchantment in American...

DOLORES CLAIBORNE By Stephen King Viking. 305 pp. $23.50 IMAGINE being buttonholed by a cantankerous old woman who won't let go until she's spilled her entire history, chapter and verse. Corraled by the local authorities for the murder of her wealthy...

Whatever happened to quiet time? You know, those precious moments of solitude when you stop, turn your thoughts inward, and listen only to yourself. Sometimes I fear it is gone forever. The other day, as I began pumping gas at my local station,...

In most of [the 22 short fictions in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"], the objects of Raymond Carver's close attention are men and women out of work, or between jobs, at loose ends, confused and often terrified. If they are kids, they play hooky. Husbands and wives lie beside each other in bed, touch cautiously, retreat, feign sleep, lie, each bewildered by what has just happened and by what might happen next. The stories themselves are not at all confused; they have been carefully ...

Raymond Carver's stories are marvels of … "completion"—the foreknowledge of nakedness—of which Cynthia Ozick speaks. Carver's stories are very short and naked, proving that it's usually better to say too little than a little too much, and also that endings matter more than beginnings. His stories [in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?] in fact begin flatly, with no effort to engage the reader in anything more than plain statements about perfectly plain ...

In their terse objectivity as well as subject matter (fathers and sons, marriages at impasse, Indians, boys fishing, insomniacs) … [the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?] suggest Carver as a descendent of Hemingway, relocated in the Pacific Northwest. But where Hemingway's purified style was meant to imply volumes of unspoken knowledge, like the seven-eighths of an iceberg underwater, Carver's method suggests that the other seven-eighths either isn't there or isn...