Works by
Robert Coover
(Writer)

Fiction

• The Origin of the Brunists (1966) -- Winner 1966 William Faulkner Award
  Originally published in 1966 and now back in print after over a decade, Robert Coover's first novel instantly established his mastery. A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a lapsed Catholic given to mysterious visions, is adopted as a doomsday prophet by a group of small-town mystics. "Exposed" by the town newspaper editor, the cult gains international notoriety and its ranks swell. As its members gather on the Mount of Redemption to await the apocalypse, Robert Coover lays bare the madness of religious frenzy and the sometimes greater madness of "normal" citizens. The Origin of the Brunists is vintage Coover -- comic, fearless, incisive, and brilliantly executed.

• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) -- A Sports Illustrated Top 100
  His name is J. Henry Waugh.  He eats takeout drinks in a neighborhood bar, picks up B-girls, and likes country music.  But he has one strange obsession -- he has devised a baseball game whose every action is determined by the throw of the dice.  Waugh is the nighttime proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, its master and its slave.  Robert Coover uses baseball and its almost perfect balance between offense and defense to explore the texture of American life and myth.  In doing so, he has created a comic masterpiece.

• Pricksongs & Descants (1969)
  Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began Coover's now-trademark riffs on fairy tales and bedtime stories. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.

• The Public Burning (1977)
  "For quite some time after the 1977 publication of The Public Burning, it was almost impossible to find a copy. The book's own publisher seemed--no, was reluctant to admit it even existed. That's because this imaginative reconstruction of the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted for giving atom bomb secrets to the Soviets, was the first major work of modern fiction to feature a still-living historical figure as a prominent character. The book's obscurity was the publisher's attempt to avoid legal repercussions from Richard Nixon, who over the course of the book engages in a romantic interlude with Ethel Rosenberg and graphically surrenders himself to a rapacious Uncle Sam. Now that Nixon's dead, however, readers are free to marvel at one of the few American novels to rival Joyce's Ulysses for sustained stylistic inventiveness. Snippets of speeches and articles from Time are recast in poetic form, entire scenes are presented in dramatic verse, as events in the Rosenberg case move towards their historically destined conclusion."  -- Ron Hogan, Amazon.com

• A Political Fable (1980)

• Charlie in the House of Rue (1980)

• Convention (1981)

• Spanking the Maid (1982)

• In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters (1983)

• Gerald's Party (1986)

• A Night at the Movies Or, You Must Remember This (1987)
  From Hollywood B-movies to Hollywood classics, A Night at the Movies invents what "might have happened" in these Saturday afternoon matinees. Mad scientists, vampires, cowboys, dance-men, Chaplin, and Bogart, all flit across Robert Coover's riotously funny screen, doing things and uttering lines that are as shocking to them as they are funny to the reader. As Coover's Program announces, you will get Coming Attractions, The Weekly Serial, Adventure, Comedy, Romance, and more, but turned upside-down and inside-out.

• Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (1987)

• Pinocchio in Venice (1991)

• Briar Rose (1996)
  "Robert Coover has a power over the language matched by few authors and a curiosity about the nature of stories and narratives that keeps his work intellectually charged, if sometimes difficult to follow. Students of postmodernism and fans of metafiction will be interested to read Briar Rose, Coover's funny deconstruction and retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale." -- Amazon.com

• John's Wife (1996)
  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

• Ghost Town (1998)
  A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out. The lonesome stranger reaches the town - or rather, it reaches him - and he becomes part of its gunfights, saloon brawls, bawdy houses, train robberies, and, of course, the choice between the saloon chanteuse or the sweet-faced schoolmistress whom he loves. Throughout, Robert Coover reanimates the Western epics of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, infusing them with the Beckettian echoes, unique comic energy, and exuberant prose that have made him one of the most influential figures in contemporary American literature.

• The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (Director's Cut) (2002)
  A virtuosic performance, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a masterpiece. It is set in Cinecity, the frozen capital of an unnamed utopia - or is it dystopia? - where Lucky Pierre plies his trade. Part porn star, part clown, part everyman, Lucky has no life outside his films. Through the lenses of his nine female muse-directors, Lucky becomes a naive castaway, a submissive slave, a child star in a barnyard frolic, a love-struck suburban hubby, a dirty cartoon, a sex-pilgrim in virtual reality, and much much more. A sparkling love song to the magic of moving pictures, and a meditation - both joyous and serious - on how sex compels and invents us, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a spectacular tour de force from an American master.

• Stepmother (2004) with Michael Kupperman, IIllustrator
  Robert Coover, a father of modern American experimental fiction, returns with "Stepmother," a masterful re-imagining of the fairy-tale tradition. There is magic, there are princes, and painful castrations. Also, there is beauty and true love, of a sort. Stepmother is illustrated by Michael Kupperman, bound in soft cloth, and stamped with precious metals.

• A Child Again (2005)
  Casey returns to bat. The Pied Piper pipes again. Little Red Riding Hood is not safe yet. Robert Coover returns with a new collection of short fiction, reexamining our shared narrative heritage — myths, fairy tales, and favorite childhood stories — and unearthing the underlying hope, fear, and wonder at their core. Playful yet systematic, satirical yet empathetic, Coover uses the stories of our past to point towards a fiction of the future.

Plays

• A Theological Position (1972)

Poetry

• The Grand Hotels (2002)

See also:

• Robert Coover (1981) by Richard Andersen

• The Metafictional Muse: The Work of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and William H. Gass (1982) by Larry McCaffery

• Robert Coover's Fictions (1986) by Jackson I. Cope

• Fiction in the Quantum Universe (1992) by Susan Strehle
  In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald Barthelme.

  According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While these actualist novels diverge markedly from realistic practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we now understand as real. Reality is no longer "realistic"; in the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen, and uncertainly known—all terms taken from new physics.

  Actualist fiction is characterized by incompletions, indeterminacy, and "open" endings unsatisfying to the readerly wish for fulfilled promises and completed patterns. Gravity's Rainbow, for example, ends not with a period but with a dash. Strehle argues that such innovations in narrative reflect on twentieth-century history, politics, science, and discourse.

• Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992) by Thomas E. Kennedy

• Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth (1994) by Thomas Pughe

• Understanding Robert Coover (2003) by Brian Evenson
  In Understanding Robert Coover, Brian Evenson takes on the work of Robert Coover, a major figure of postmodern metafiction. In a careful analysis of Coover's short stories and novels, Evenson demonstrates how Coover writes in several different modes that cross over into one another. He explores Coover's concern with notions of community and the ways communities hold together through a series of shared stories and myths--myths that often, once they lose their effectiveness, come to justify violence. In this comprehensive study, Evenson discusses Coover’s novels, from his award-winning first book, The Origin of the Brunists, to his controversial The Public Burning--which has as its narrator the young Vice President Richard Nixon. He studies the writer’s reworkings of fairy tales in Pricksongs & Descants, Pinocchio in Venice, and Briar Rose, as well as the revisionary Western, Ghost Town. Evenson also examines Coover’s latest novel, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut.

  Evenson explicates Coover's rewriting of myths and explores his willingness to break the frame of his fiction so as to include both fantastic and realistic elements. Evenson also shows that, for Coover, storymaking is essential to what makes us human, and for that reason his ideas remain at the heart of what makes literature dynamic and intriguing. Understanding Robert Coover addresses these issues, and explicates Coover's often difficult and formally innovative fiction.