Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) was Carver's first major collection of short stories. The stories feature blue collar characters struggling to deal with problems such as alcoholism, adultery, and despair. Many of the themes that recur in Carver's later collections appear here for the first time: the failure of people to communicate with each other, how people contrive to mismanage their lives, how people survive what happens to them and come to terms with their limitations.

Carver admired the work of Bobbie Ann Mason. Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason (1998) is a collection of seventeen stories from two previous collections by Mason, who like Carver has been labeled a minimalist by critics. Like Carver, Mason focuses on working-class life. Her characters live on the edge of poverty, often unemployed or in insecure employment, in rural and small-town...