Pricksongs And Descants

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.

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.

This text takes on the work of Robert Coover, a major figure of postmodern metafiction. In an analysis of Coover's short stories and novels, it demonstrates how Coover writes in several different modes that cross over into one another.

Originally published in 1969, 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 peculiar man subject to religious visions, is adopted as a prophet and quickly gains a following. Rapidly disseminated through the magic of media exposure, the cult spreads across America, and 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.

Ros is dead. A bad actress but a tremendous lover, when she was alive her thighs pillowed cast members, crew, friends and acquaintances. Now Gerald's party continues around her murdered corpse (it is, after all, just the first of the night), as the guests indulge in drinking, flirting and jealousies, and the police make their brutal investigations. An evening of cocktails, sex and violence, Robert Coover's novel is a murder mystery as rousing and disorienting as the best drunken party, a vaudevillian masterpiece.

A parody of the western novel featuring a hero who drifts into town to become both sheriff and outlaw. All the elements of the genre are present, from train robbery and runaway stagecoach, to cattle stampede. By the author of The Public Burning.