Carver, Carver, Carver! Carol Sklenicka Appears for the new Raymond Carver Bio on December 3rd

A surprising amount of visitors to Boswell have books coming out. Sometimes I hear from them closer to pub date and sometimes I don't. Last summer, Carol Sklenicka stopped by to say that she had written a book on Raymond Carver that would be coming out at the end of the year. She had some connections to Milwaukee and might I be interested in doing an event?

So now we have an event scheduled, and what a coup this is. For Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, just got a glowing front page New York Times Book Review write up. You can read it here.

I am not one to read too many 500+ page books (and I am teased about this by Jason), but I read every word of this. Carver's life was the stuff of novels--hardscrabble, hard-drinking, lots of moving and job changes and family troubles and a tough marriage, albeit one clearly filled with love. Sklenicka connects these details with his stories and poetry and it made me want to go back and read Carver again, which I guess is the goal of any good literary biography.

But in this case, I want to read him twice, with and without the Gordon Lish edits. We've got Carver backlist in stock, newly jacketed no less.

The event is Thursday, December 3rd, 7 PM.

There's some Milwaukee connections in the story as well. Carver did spend at least some time as an artist-in-residence at UWM, and local writer C.J. Hribal got one of Carver's last blurbs for his novel Matty's Heart. That book's unavailable right now, but we sell his current novel, The Company Car. Oh, and I'm selling it at Sugar Maple on Monday, December 14th, at Sugar Maple for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. That starts at 6:30 PM.