This is the sort of book people write drooling dribbling cock-tugging theses about—the multifariousness of its structure and tropes and voices is denser than a chocolate-and-toffee car park cake (a cake the size of an actual car park). I toggled between three and four stars because I was with the...
Legendary NarrativesThis collection of early stories is not a lesser work in any way. In it, Coover maps out the journey that his writing career would subsequently follow. It announces and displays his early ambition and skill.It reflects a dual interest in the subject matter of fiction and its m...
The action of Toby Olson’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Seaview sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod. Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husban...
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.
Coover's Pinocchio is yet another of Coover's novels which the weak of heart and the easily queezey ought to avoid. It's not the excessive poop stuff or the sex stuff ;; we all have to put up with that stuff on a daily basis, like breathing. And it's not really the dimensionality of characteri...
I cannot now for the life of me remember where I first ran across the article reporting that The Origin of the Brunists was being reissued, the glowing recommendation that led me to add Robert Coover's first novel to my to-read list even though it's not at all the sort of thing I usually enjoy. T...
A great little book that exceeded my expectations. Why this isn't regarded as one of Coover's standouts, I don't know. Perhaps because, unlike a lot of go-to Coover, this one isn't about postmodernist tricks and surrealist surprises; it's just a highly enjoyable bit of comic realism with great ...
A low cloud cover. The boat bobs silently, its motor for some reason dead. There’s enough light in the far sky to see the obscure humps of islands a mile or two distant, but up close: nothing. There are islands in the intermediate distance, but their uncertain contours are more felt than seen. Th...
WHERE THE LIGHT IS WEIRD. Shadowless, but like a negative, as though the light itself were shadow turned inside out. The stiffs are out of sight, temporarily archived in drawers like meaty data, chilled to their own bloodless temperature. Their stories have not ended, only their own readings of t...
VIEW FROM THE CLOCK TOWER Across the ruffled lead-colored waters of St. Mark's Basin, poised between crenellated Gothic fantasy and High Renaissance exuberance, Andrea Palladio's masterful church of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its sagging cheeks, ca...
Try telling Veronica, for example, that sex was fun. It had a certain tickle, all right, but it was more like terminal athlete’s foot. Or hemorrhoids, more aptly, given her dearly beloved’s brutish fancies. For whom, the middle Maynard, no joy either. More like prosecuting a tough case, proving h...
said Tommy Cavanaugh, alias Kit Cavanaugh, alias the Kitten, known in the bleachers and back seats as “the boy with the paws that refresh,” youngest son of the town banker, starting forward on the basketball team and class officer, owner at sixteen of his own set of wheels, “wouldn’t hurt people....
The Eye in the Sky I had to stop in a washroom on my way to the office to clean up, couldn’t let my staff see me like this. I slapped through the swinging doors, still keyed up, ready for battle, but the place was empty. Those goddamn organ grinders out there pissed me off, Pearson especially—Win...
