A Note on the Text

This text follows the manuscript version of A Small, Good Thing in all matters. This version of the story was published in the short story collection Beginners in 2009. Beginners is a re-publishing of the stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love which was published in 1981 by Alfred K. Knopf and heavily edited by Gordon Lish. Beginners contains Carver’s unedited stories. The manuscript text was recovered and transcribed by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll and was published in The Library of America’s Collected Stories of Raymond Carver. The version of the story titled The Bath that was used for this text is also found in Collected Stories.

In this digital edition, A Small, Good Thing is first presented as Raymond Carver intended the story to be published, the version that was establish by Stull and Carroll. Next, the story is presented with the edits made by Gordon Lish laid over top. My hope is that the reader gets an accurate sense of the scope of these edits and see just how little of the original text was left untouched by the end of the editing process. While scrolling, keep in mind that these edits were made by Lish in pen directly onto the typewritten manuscript sent to him by Carver, not using a computer or word processor. The fonts chosen for Lish’s edits and the way they appear one letter at a time on the page aim to mimic the effect of a pen on paper.

This edition is designed to function a bit like a book while also taking advantage of the ease of navigation the web allows for. Each piece of the edition gets its own page with back and forward buttons for navigation, or turning the page. The Table of Contents can found in the navigation bar at the top and makes it easy to move through the book. At the very end of the edition can be found scans from The Library of America, Collected Stories and files from the collating process. In order to create the interactive edits, I transcribed both stories from this text, then created a “diff” to note every single difference between the two.

A Note on the Cover

The cover of this edition features a photo of a culvert. This culvert is from Ann’s flashback to a day when she believed Scotty had died by being pulled into a culvert during heavy rain. This scene was unfortunately completely cut by Gordon Lish. In it, Ann stands at the culvert wrestling with the possibility of her son being gone and wondering if she could have some kind of peace without him. This is also where she begs God to save her son and in exchange she promises to change her life. The culvert is a place of waiting, where Ann doesn’t know if her son is alive or dead. After the car accident, Scotty is once again in a place of waiting, this time in a hospital bed. The culvert represents a state between alive and dead, where Ann and Howard exist for most of the story.

Cover image source: Photo by Eric Stoynov on Unsplash