"One cannot imagine the late Raymond Carver as a first baseman, or as financier, or as Cromwell's foreign secretary," wrote Lee Oser in World Literature Today. "His writing explores a narrow bandwidth in the spectrum of human life, and his world is a place of limitations." Carver-land is one in which characters are "incarcerated by time and circumstance, but whose dreary lives are occasionally ignited by moments of startling clarity," according to a contributor for Publishers Weekly in a review of his posthumous collected poems, All of Us. Carver, both poet and short story writer, "massaged a career from material little more suggestive than pocket litter," declared Lyall Bush in a review of the story collection Short Cuts in Studies in Short Fiction: "funny-to-appalling monologues and dialogues where dead-end depression meets Man Ray-esque juxtapositions of the ugly and exhilarating." But that description is only one part of the...