Books with title CATHEDRAL TPB

Architecture lovers and Francophiles, rejoice. French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel set at the famed cathedral at Chartres contains such detailed descriptions of the site's layout and construction that early tourists sometimes used it as a guidebook. The book is the third in a series of works that follow the religious conversion and spiritual life of Durtal, the protagonist that Huysmans modeled on himself.

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of "Cathedral" in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.

This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The twelve stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work and "overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life. . . . Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty . . . his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart" (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World).