Staring at the kitschy Andy Warhol window displays at Barney’s while stealing away from a Couples Shopping Experience to smoke a cigarette on the street today, an odd thought stole upon me—Raymond Carver was, in a certain sense, a successor to Andy Warhol. How so? Both had their narrow sort of idiosyncratic genius, and both deserve their canonical status, but both, despite taking drastically different routes to get there, became iconic spokesman for a creative form—Warhol for pop art, Carver for the modern realist short story—and, in doing so, each in his respective field ushered in at least a generation of truly wretched work.