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Join us on Thursday at 3PM to chat about the book!

A Small, Good Thing

by Raymond Carver

Read the book online: A Small, Good Thing

Read as a PDF: A Small, Good Thing

This week in the Book Club we will be reading 'A Small, Good Thing' by Raymond Carver. This is a follow up book from last week's where we read 'The Bath' by Raymond Carver - The shorter form version of this same story. Have a look at the ways in which the stories are similar and the ways in which they differ.

"A Small, Good Thing," an award-winning story by American short story writer and poet, Raymond Carver, was published in Carver's third major collection of stories, Cathedral, in 1983. In his first two collections, Carver had established himself as a new and compelling voice in American literature and a master of the short story form. In Cathedral, he took his craft to new levels of insight into the human condition. "A Small, Good Thing" is generally regarded as one of Carver's finest stories, in which he goes beyond the spare narratives and unrelieved bleakness of some of his earlier work.

"About suffering they were never wrong, the old Masters: how well they understood it's human position: how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along..."

About the Author

Poet and short-story writer Raymond Carver was born on the 25th of May 1938 in the logging town of Clatskanie, Oregon, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. He was married and the father of two before he was 20, and he held a number of low-paying jobs: he “picked tulips, pumped gas, swept hospital corridors, swabbed toilets, [and] managed an apartment complex,” according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times Magazine profile of the author. Not coincidentally, “of all the writers at work today, Carver may have [had] the most distinct vision of the working class,” as Ray Anello observed in a Newsweek article. Carver attended Chico State University, where he studied with John Gardner, and earned his BA from Humboldt State College in 1963. He published his first short-story and poem while at Humboldt State.

What is the book club?

Join us every week for a book club, each week we will read a new short story of part of a larger book, the books will be made available as an audio book and we will meet as a group via zoom to chat about the story. All are welcome, hope to see you there. 

How to join the club to chat

The zoom link to join will apear above on this page at 3PM on Thursday. To join you will need a phone/tablet or laptop with a built in camera and microphone (most modern devices come with this) you may need to download the zoom app onto your phone if you are using a phone to join.

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