Robert Coover

The lone survivor of a catastrophic mine explosion announces that the end of the world is at hand and begins a new cult that, sweeping the mining towns, gathers believers in anticipation of the Coming of the End of the World. Reprint.

A Novel

The Origin of the Brunists

A middle-aged accountant invents a dice-controlled baseball world.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

Presents a collection of short stories based on traditional fairy tales that expose the futility of idealism.

Fictions

Pricksongs and Descants

Our leading postmodernist novelist turns his iconoclastic eye on a great American classic, evoking the language and irreverent spirit of Mark Twain.

Huck Out West

A recreation of the tale of "Sleeping Beauty" tells of a prince tangled in the briars, a sleeping princess who dreams of a succession of kissing princes, and a grizzled fairy who inhabits the princess' dreams, inflaming her desires

Briar Rose

A Western town takes on a life of its own when a stranger rides in and is drawn into a series of brawls, gunfights, and train robberies while becoming entangled with a saloon singer and a schoolmistress, with whom he falls in love.

Ghost Town

The bestselling author of "The Public Burning" spins a darkly magical tale about life in an ordinary small town and the woman who casts a spell on its inhabitants.

Johns Wife

Portrays the erotic relationship of a man and his maid, whom he repeatedly and ritualistically disciplines for failing to perform her cleaning duties perfectly

Spanking the Maid

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1968.

The Universal Baseball Association

Joseph Cornell

Edited by Jonathan Safran Foer. Writings by: Jonathan Safran Foer, Diane Ackerman, Martine Bellen, John Burghardt, Mary Caponegro, Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Siri Hustvedt, Ann Lauterbach, Barry Lopez, Rick Moody, Bradford Morrow, Howard Norman, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, Erik Anderson Reece, Rosemarie Waldrop, Paul West, Diane Williams, John Yau.

Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell

A Convergence of Birds

La hoguera pública

A forlorn cowboy is forced to serve as both lawman and outlaw to a desert ghost town, resulting in a performance as comi-tragic as Don Quixote's, in a send-up of the Western epic. 17,500 first printing. Tour.

The Colonel’s Daughter

In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters

"Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on - a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his guests (besides an evening gone mad) is part murder mystery, part British parlor drama, and part sly and dazzling meditation on time, theater, and love.

Gerald's Party

“A mixtape of variations and a fugue on time from a postmodern master.… Familiar tales and conventional genres are made new, tinged with shuddering wonder and titillating humor.” —Yu-Yun Hsieh, The New York Times Book Review Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as “a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America.” Here, in this selection of his best stories, you will find an invisible man tragically obsessed by an invisible woman; a cartoon man in a cartoon car who runs over a real man who is arrested by a real policeman with cartoon eyes; a stick man who reinvents the universe. While invading the dreams and nightmares of others, Coover cuts to the core of how realism works.

Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions

Art Spiegelman

Robert Coover's detective novelette, STREET COP, is set in a dystopian world of infectious 'living dead,' murderous robo-cops, aging street walkers, and walking streets. With drawings by Art Spiegelman, this short tale scrutinizes the arc of the American myth, exploring the working of memory in a digital world, police violence and the future of urban life. STREET COP is provocative and prophetic, asking us to interrogate the line between a condemnable system and a sympathetic individual.

Street Cop

These two novellas by the groundbreaking, fearless, and immeasurably influential Robert Coover are dirty, funny and brilliant. In Briar Rose a sleeping beauty is trapped in an enchantment for a hundred years, dreaming of stories in which someone like her wakes up disappointed, or becomes a mother, or is stripped and defiled. And, as she dreams, outside, failed princes die and hang their remains on the thorns of a briar hedge. In Spanking the Maid a maid and her master are each committed to their own hard service: she, attempting to perform her simple duties without error; he, supplying punishment by rod, belt, hairbrush, whip, cane and slipper when she inevitably fails. These tales of desire are Coover at his most darkly playful.

Robert Coover

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