SHELF LIFE

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver

‘For a long time, particularly through my teens, I didn’t have much to do with fiction. I still read a lot, making good use of the library, but hoovered up books on boyish pursuits like dinosaurs and aircraft, and near enough loaned the covers off Usborne’s Detective’s Handbook, in preparation for my inevitable career as a successful sleuth.

‘By the time I left school, I had caught the fiction bug again. That summer, as a gift for my eighteenth birthday, I received Carver’s first collection of storiess from a family friend who was a librarian. For the first time, I found myself asking questions about what a writer was doing, the decisions they were