Raymond Carver has been described as "one of the true contemporary masters" of the short story by Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books. A professor of English at Syracuse University, Carver has published three collections of short stories: "Will You Please Be Quiet Please," "Furious Seasons," and most recently, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." A new collection of stories will be published by Knopf this year. In addition, Carver has published three collections of poetry. His stories, which have won several 0. Henry Awards, the Best American Short Story award, and the Pushcart Press award, have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, Harpers, Antaeus, and The Paris Review. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry and fiction, and a Wallace Stegner Literary Fellow. "Will You Please Be Quiet Please" was nominated for the National Book Award for fiction in 1977. [extracted from 1982 brochure]