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Short Cuts

Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

By Raymond Carver, Robert Altman

(23)

| Paperback | 9780679748649

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Book Description

A movie tie-in edition to the brilliant new film by Robert Altman, based on these nine stories by Carver, "one of the great short story writers of our time--of any time" (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Critics

Why the birthday party didn’t happen

Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout – insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women – and although there a ... (read full critics)

lrb published on Fri, 3 Sep 2010

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

At the outset, but not for long, the twenty-two principal characters in Robert Altman’s new movie, Short Cuts, are vibrating with relatively well-founded panic. Black helicopters flying in formations more like the Valkyrie assault in Apocalypse Now t ... (read full critics)

nybooks published on Sat, 21 Aug 2010

2 Reviews

Carver's work is over the normal lives of normal people, caught at a cornerstone they are unable to see.
Some stories stand out and touch the heart. "A Small, Good Thing", where the parents of a kid hurt in a car accident on his birthday are tormented by mysterious calls. Or “Will you please be quie ... (continue)

Carver's work is over the normal lives of normal people, caught at a cornerstone they are unable to see.
Some stories stand out and touch the heart. "A Small, Good Thing", where the parents of a kid hurt in a car accident on his birthday are tormented by mysterious calls. Or “Will you please be quiet please?”, the obsession of Ralph until Marion confesses she cheated on you, once. Or still "So much water so close to home", four friends find a girl's body, and keep fishing for days before colling the police.
But all of them share Carver's brilliant ability in connecting the reader with the characters, their feelings and intimate toughs with just a sentence, an action.
Nine short stories and a poem. Robert Altman transfers "Carver's world", in the words of the writer's wife, in the neighborhood of Los Angeles. And reinterprets them in depicting the "America today" in "Short Cuts" ("Leone d'oro" and "Coppa Volpi" in Venice 1993).
An excellent excuse to discover and contrast two masters at their best.

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Candysroom said on Mar 16, 2010 | Add your feedback

Challenging

I also had to write down a movie script based on it... EXHAUSTING!!!

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Fudgella said on Dec 12, 2007 | Add your feedback