Dirty realism

Dirty realism is a minimalist literary style depicting ordinary hardships, flawed characters, and bleak routines, especially among working-class people in contemporary settings.

Minimalism: An artistic approach that reduces form and detail to essentials. Dirty realism uses pared-down language and restrained description.
Raymond Carver: An American short-story writer known for spare prose and accounts of working-class lives. His stories became defining examples of the style, though he rejected the label.
Cathedral (short story): A 1983 short story by Raymond Carver about a man whose encounter with a blind visitor unsettles his assumptions. Its ordinary domestic setting and limited narrator exemplify understated transformation.
Dirty realism (art movement): A 1980s German art movement depicting urban life through rough, figurative painting. The shared name describes a visual movement, not this literary style.
Literary realism: A mode of fiction that represents recognizable social life and ordinary experience. Dirty realism narrows realism toward unglamorous routines and material hardship.
Richard Ford: An American novelist and short-story writer whose fiction often portrays ordinary people in precarious circumstances. His early stories helped establish dirty realism as a recognizable literary tendency.
A Small, Good Thing: A 1983 short story by Raymond Carver about parents grieving their child's death and a baker's unexpected kindness. It turns a plain, painful family crisis into an unsentimental account of connection.
Southern Gothic: A literary mode that uses grotesque characters and disturbing events to examine the American South. Its heightened grotesquerie contrasts with dirty realism's restrained ordinary settings.
Working class: A social class of people whose livelihoods primarily depend on selling their labor. Working-class pressures and limited options shape many dirty realist settings.
Tobias Wolff: An American writer of short stories and memoirs, often focused on morally complicated lives. His fiction shares the style's compressed form and unsentimental attention to hardship.

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