What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver

Still one of the best titles ever, and the stories are just harrowing. "Why don't you dance?" is, I think, my favorite from the collection, or maybe "So much water so close to home", but they are all shattering little things. Reading them, I was very much aware that Bonnie Jo Campbell's 2009 National Book Award finalist collection , American Salvage, seems to inhabit the same the raggedy vinyl-sided America as Carver's characters.