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Selected Short Fictions
by Robert Coover
A collection of the best short fictions from the grandmaster of postmodernism.
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).
"Starred Review. A career-topping marvel, this collection finds meaning in the wildness of the cultural subconscious." - Publishers Weekly
"What was once daring may now seem a little tame, but Coover's influence endures, and this collection provides good evidence for why that should be so." - Kirkus
"The appearance of Coover's "short fictions" (as the cover has it, managing expectations about traditional short story structure) provides an excellent opportunity to look back at the development of a true original. Is there any other experimental writer whose work has appeared in such a diverse array of publications, from men's magazines (Cavalier, Playboy) to literary journals (Evergreen, Iowa Review) to high-circulation stalwarts (Esquire, Harper's, the New Yorker)?" - Booklist
This information about Going For a Beer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Robert Coover is the author, most recently of Huck Out West, among many others publications. He is a pioneer in the field of electronic writing and founded the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program, at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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