A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.

The Bookmarked series is comprised of short, personal books from writers exploring how a particular work of fiction helped shape their writing and life. “It’s a simple idea,” Kirby Gann, series editor and author of the first volume, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, told Poets and Writers. “The series celebrates classic books on a personal, intimate level, as opposed to capital-C Criticism.”