
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver · 1981
The Lish-edited Carver at its most extreme: stories stripped to their syntactic bones. Controversial (see Beginners, the unedited version) but enormously influential. The title story is a masterpiece of drunk philosophical despair.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.