书名：Cathedral 大教堂
作者：Raymond Carver
出版社名称：Vintage Classics 
出版时间：2009
语种：英语
ISBN：9780099530336
商品尺寸：12.9 x 1.4 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装

卡佛致力于描绘美国的蓝领生活，是写失败者的失败者，写酒鬼的酒鬼。生活的变质和走投无路后的无望，是他小说中的常态。小说主人公有饭店女招待、维他命推销员、机械师、邮递员、剃头匠，等等。有评论认为他的小说有“表面的平静，主题的普通，面无表情的叙事，以及想不清楚的人物。”故事多数平常：小夫妇没能生出孩子以至生活灰暗；父母等待被撞伤的孩子醒来，却以孩子悄然离去结尾；卖维他命的女人很焦虑，而丈夫正觊觎着她的同伴……小说常有意想不到的结尾。

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.