"I love the swift leap of a good story...and the fact that the story can be written and read in one sitting," wrote the late Raymond Carver of his affection for the short story in 1988. Indeed, such was that affection that as far as his fiction was concerned, they were all he ever wrote. The result, in the words of Salman Rushdie, was "one of America's most original, truest voices."

Shortly before his death from lung cancer, Carver made his own choice of best work, revising texts as he saw fit, and compiling them for this one mammoth, authoritative edition, culling from the entire range of his career - the first collection Furious Seasons (1977) to his last, Elephant (1988). The latter is reproduced here in its entirety. What they seek to represent is the definitive word on "America's laureate of the dispossessed". (His other disciplines, as widely published novelist and reviewer, can be pursued elsewhere.)

In 1983, Carver wrote that he had once read a letter by Chekov advising aspiring authors that they need not "write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds." The Russian's words could almost be taken as the credo of Carver's art.

Where I'm Calling From is made up of 37 pieces in which, for the most part, very little extraordinary and memorable does actually happen. These are tales populated by recognisably ordinary people; people who worry about money, worry about their families, worry about leading ordinary, decent lives. That is not to say that things do not happen to these people - in 'A Small, Good Thing', a couple's young son dies in a motor accident but they find a small, good epiphany from a most unexpected source; a man drowns in 'The Third Thing that Killed My Father Off' (the first was Pearl Harbor, the second moving to a farm) - but these are exceptions to the rule. For the most part Carver's short stories (and they indeed very short stories - the longest barely reaches 20 pages) are snapshots of life as it is lived.

In 'Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes' parents squabble over a missing bike. 'What Do You Do in San Francisco?' is a postman's view of the new family that moves onto his morning route, then away again. He meditates on their undeliverable mail: "There isn't much. And I don't mind. It's all work, one way or the other, and I'm always glad to have it." Bill and Arlene discover a little more about their marriage when asked in Neighbors to look after the apartment next door; it's a brilliantly turned, perfectly contained 6 page piece that the author quaintly later worried was "too thin, too elliptical and subtle, too inhuman."

Stylistically Carver's prose was clipped, precise, intensely readable. He believed in getting in, getting the job done, and getting out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Effective as it was, it is maybe unfair to single out particular stories, but the aforementioned Neighbors, and the astonishing 'So Much Water So Close to Home' (wherein a wife is disturbed by her husband's discovery of a woman's body in a river) stand out as enviably shining examples of the short story form.

If this collection has a flaw then it lies in omitting other parts of his canon equally worthy of inclusion (the extraordinary early, semi-experimental 'Furious Seasons' would have made an intriguing contrast), but even so Where I'm Calling From more than confirms Raymond Carver's position as one of the preeminent voices of contemporary fiction. Required reading.