‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ by Raymond Carver

The simplicity of language and action in this story encourages the reader to co-create the “more to it” that cannot be “talked out.” I imagined entire lives on this artfully blank canvas, in a frame sketched out with minimal words:

His side, her side.

First published in Quarterly West, 1978. This version first published in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988