These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote.
This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work..
Among them is one of his longest, "Errand", in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared.
These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote