"What do any of us really know about love?"

To the left is an image of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver, a book I randomly took out at the library and probably one of my better literary decisions made in a while, and for forever.  
These stories are economic and minimal yet delivered with awesome kick.  The tales contained in this Carver collection are of love-like situations, fragile structures, and memories you don't often hear or read about in fiction—they aren't very happy, the characters aren't either...they're delicate, relatable—and you (the reader) are there to witness it all.  You're there to witness the emptiness and how ordinary things can fall apart, and what's left there of, too. You get to witness the shatterable human condition, the noise.  There also lingers a heavy scent of danger and desperation threaded throughout the collection, and the repetition of survival inherent in all its scenes. 
My own writing style, or ambition rather, is to successfully package a hearty story using minimal technique and tool—I've learned that this is quite tricky to master in prose writing. So reading (short) stories by authors who gets it right fills me with such literary/writerly pleasure, fervour, inspiration, also anxiety, despondency, and so on; but mostly with appreciation for the art, for the toiling, for the crafting, for the honing, for the pushing against the tide that blocks.  

There are a few standout stories I deep-in-my-heart know I noted in some notebook to remember and to post about here; thing is, I cannot find the note anywhere, which is wholly annoying.  Therefore, this post is both published and under construction.  Almost in likeness to Carver's own cunning way of ending his shorts: slight, and selfishly, abridged.