This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. 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. “Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it.” -Chicago Tribune Book World