About the Stories

These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. Among them is one of his longest, Errand, in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared.

Significance of the Story

This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.