SOURCE: Rushdie, Salman. “Raymond Carver.” In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, pp. 340-42. London, UK: Granta Books, 1991.

In the following essay, the novelist tells of reading poems in memory of Carver, discusses a few poems, and urges the reader to “read everything Raymond Carver wrote.”

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. 

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. 

One Sunday last November, in some suitably ‘high tacky’ club in London, a bunch of us read out pieces for, and by, and in memory of, Raymond Carver. At one moment I looked along my row and the truth is we were all blubbering away, or close to it, anyhow, except for Ray's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, who loved him most and who reminded me then of my grandmother refusing tears...