1. Kim Herzinger spends the first several pages of her essay “On the New Fiction” trying to come up with a better term than “minimalism” but finally settles on it because of problems with all other terms used to define the majority of new contemporary fiction of the eighties: “Dirty Realism (Granta); New Realism; Pop Realism; . . . Neo-Domestic Neo-Realism; . . . White Trash Fiction; Coke Fiction, Extra-Realism” and so on (8). Raymond Carver himself, whose work seems almost synonymous with “minimalism,” did not like the term. Kirk Nesset, in his book on Carver’s stories, rightly observes that the label is “unfortunate . . . considering its sloppy connection to the disciplines from which it was borrowed, and considering the fact that the practitioners of literary ‘minimalism’ boast in general far more differences than similarities in terms of individual craft” (4). In fact, the term in art and music suggests, one could argue, the exact opposite of what it has come to mean in literature. While literary proponents of “minimalism” largely attempt to elide the author through the use of flat tone and so on in order to stress character and content, “minimalist” artists largely remove subjects (what would be characters in literature) in order to stress form.