Robert Coover

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, part sly and dazzling meditation of time, theater, and love.

"Cinecity is the frozen capital of an unnamed utopia - or is it dystopia? - where Lucky Pierre plies his trade, and it is the only world he knows. Part porn star, part clown, part everyman, Lucky has no life outside the films he is in, films created by nine women filmmakers, each with her own creative and sexual proclivities. Through the lenses of his nine muse-directors, Lucky - a.k.a. Wee Willie, Peter Prick, Crazy Leg, Badboy, Pete the Beast - becomes a naive castaway, a submissive slave, a child star in a barnyard frolic, a love-struck suburban hubby, a hologram, a sexual outlaw, a monk, a monkey, a mountain-climber, a dirty cartoon, a sex-pilgrim in virtual reality, and much much more. Coover's irrepressible imagination - or that of his nine filmmakers - is boundless . . . and merciless.". "But what is destiny in a world where there is no line between reality and the increasingly outrageous fantasy of the director and the camera? Recalling the protagonist of The Truman Show if Georges Bataille had written it, Lucky Pierre is both louche and innocent, a caricature of pornographic conventions and a stand-in for all human efforts to sort out vanity, performance, emotion, and motive from the ecstasy that reveals us to ourselves."--BOOK JACKET.

"Robert Coover returns with "Stepmother," a reimagining of the fairy-tale tradition. There is magic, there are princes, there are painful castrations. There are grim reapers, frisky maidens and seductive ogresses. There is also beauty, and true love, of a sort."--BOOK JACKET.

John had many things - money, high regard, friends, and power. He was a builder by trade, a master of the physical domain. The objects that fell before him only arose to become greater structures. But it was John's wife who both enchanted and haunted this small town. Floyd, manager of Main Street Hardware, coveted John's wife. Otis just plain loved her. And Daphne loved her too, but Daphne thought she'd love her even more if John's wife were dead. And Gordon was obsessed with capturing the very essence of her on film, though this was impossible since John's wife just didn't seem to be there. That was the strange thing about John's wife - she seemed to have a thereness that just was not quite there. She was always in the hearts and minds of the town, an endearing and ubiquitous presence, yet few people, if asked, could describe her, even when she passed right before their very eyes. To this small town John's wife was as much a mystery as a coveted object.

A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."

While developing a new system to maintain Morganville's defenses, student Claire Danvers discovers a way to amplify vampire mental powers. Through this, she's able to re-establish the field around this vampire-infested Texas college town that protects it from outsiders. But the new upgrades have an unexpected consequence: people inside the town begin to slowly forget who they are-even the vampires. Soon, the town's little memory problem has turned into a full-on epidemic. Now Claire needs to figure out a way to pull the plug on her experiment- before she forgets how to save Morganville...

In Robert Coover's Huck Out West, also "wrote by Huck," the boys escape "sivilization" and "light out for the Territory, riding for the famous but short-lived Pony Express, then working as scouts for both sides in the war. They are suddenly separated when Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than leave it, returning east with his new wife, Becky Thatcher, to learn the law from her father. Huck, abandoned and "dreadful lonely," hires himself out to "whosoever." He rides shotgun on coaches, wrangles horses on a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, joins a gang of bandits, guides wagon trains, gets dragged into U.S. Army massacres, suffers a series of romantic and barroom misadventures. He is eventually drawn into a Lakota tribe by a young brave, Eeteh, an inventive teller of Coyote tales who "was having about the same kind of trouble with his tribe as I was having with mine." There is an army colonel who wants to hang Huck and destroy Eeteh's tribe, so they're both on the run, finding themselves ultimately in the Black Hills just ahead of the 1876 Gold Rush. This period, from the middle of the Civil War to the centennial year of 1876, is probably the most formative era of the nation's history. In the West, it is a time of grand adventure, but also one of greed, religious insanity, mass slaughter, virulent hatreds, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, huge disparities of wealth. Only Huck's sympathetic and gently comical voice can make it somehow bearable.

Every night after work, J. Henry Waugh immerses himself in his fantasy baseball league. As owner of every team in the league, Henry is flush with pride in a young rookie who is pitching a perfect game. When the pitcher completes the miracle game, Henry's life lights up. But then the rookie is killed by a freak accident, and this "death" affects Henry in ways unimaginable.--p. 4 of cover.

A "deeply provocative, obsessive story of the indissoluble relationship of bondage between a man and his maid. She arrives in his bedroom every morning with her cleaning paraphernalia, hoping to make each new round of work the perfect one for her master. He, in turn, can only notice the failure to change the towels, to fold the sheets properly, to keep her uniform crisp and clean ... It is, her assures her, an obligation to an abstract ideal of a higher order that compiles him to lead her own fulfillment in completing her tasks to utmost perfection."--Jacket.

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." Coover finds inspiration in everything from painting, cinema, theater, and dance to slapstick, magic acts, puzzles, and riddles. His 1969 story "The Babysitter" has alone inspired generations of innovative young writers. Here, in this selection of his best stories, spanning more than half a century, 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, long dead, disrupting them from within, Coover cuts to the core of how realism works. He uses metafiction as a means of "interrogating the fiction making process," at least insofar as that process, when unexamined, has a way of entrapping us in false and destructive stories, myths, and belief systems. These stories are riven with paradox, ambivalence, strangeness, unrealized ambitions and desires, uncertainty, complexity, always seeking the potential for insight, for comedy. Through their celebration of the improbable and unexpected, and their distinctive but complementary grammars of text and film, Coover's selected short fictions entertain by engaging with the tribal myths that surround us--religious, patriotic, literary, erotic, popular--often satirizing the mindsets that, out of some obscure primitive need, perpetuate them. The thirty stories in Going for a Beer confirm Coover's reputation as "one of America's greatest literary geniuses" (Alan Moore).