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 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-fé at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless public burning.

Originally published in 1969 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. A novel of intensity and conviction ... a splendid talent ... heir to Dreiser or Lewis. -- The New York Times Book Review; A breathtaking masterpiece on any level you approach it. -- Sol Yurick; [The Origin of the Brunists] delivers the goods . . . [and] says what it has to say with rudeness, vigor, poetry and a headlong narrative momentum. -- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

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.

One hundred floors above Manhattan, a diverse group of guests and gate-crashers come together in a luxurious penthouse. The down-and-out blend seamlessly with the well-to-do. Scammers find themselves the target of a con so twisted that by the time they begin to figure it out it's too late to extract themselves. But what's the occasion? Is it a party? A religious congregation? A real estate listing? Or is there something else going on?

For over half a century, Robert Coover has been one of the most inventive and unpredictable writers in the American academy. Long heralded for his commitment to formal as well as technological innovation, with Open House, Coover reminds readers that his work is as steeped in literary history as it is forward-thinking experimentation. This tension--between old and new, between a romanticized past and a future we only pretend we can predict--animates Coover's latest metafiction, where narrative is at once the point and so beside the point that it calls into question all the myths by which we organize our lives.

From Evergreen Review Books, an imprint of OR Books.

Robert Coover's many acclaimed works of fiction have established him as a powerhouse among America's postmodernist writers. With Briar Rose, he casts his own unmistakable style on an ageless tale. A brilliant recreation of the timeless Sleeping Beauty story, Briar Rose tells of a prince trapped in the briars; a sleeping beauty who cannot awaken, dreaming of a succession of kissing princes; and the old spell-casting fairy who inhabits the princess's dreams, regaling her with legends of other sleeping beauties and trying to imagine the nature of human desire.

At the end of Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape sivilization and light out for the Territory. In Robert Coover's vision of their Western adventures, Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than escape it, leaving Huck dreadful lonely in a country of bandits, war parties, and gold. In the course of his ventures, Huck reunites with old friends, facing hard truths and even harder choices.

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. It is, as The Washington Post Book World put it, a fast-forward, ribald vision of the American West, a free-for-all that slides from surreal to ridiculous like a circus-goer's grin through a funhouse mirror . . . a heady frisson, a salon entertainment, one helluva ride.

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

Pinocchio in Venice is a carnivalesque reemersion in the well-known fairy tale - as well as magic realism, Mann's Death in Venice, and Nabokov's Lolita - with the puppet, now an aged Nobel Prize winner and aesthete, returning to Venice to pay his final tribute. As he turns back to wood, Robert Coover's hero is reunited with his old friends and foes while he painfully searches for the Blue-Haired Fairy who put flesh on his limbs.

Written in Coover's signature style, this is both a brilliant meditation on what it means to be human and a hilarious and bawdy adventure. Pinocchio in Venice represents Coover at his finest.

West Condon, small-town USA, five years later: the Brunists are back, loonies and cretins aplenty in tow, wanting it all--sainthood and salvation, vanity and vacuity, God's fury and a good laugh--for the end is at hand.

The Brunist Day of Wrath, the long-awaited sequel to the award-winning The Origin of the Brunists, is both a scathing indictment of fundamentalism and a careful examination of a world where religion competes with money, common sense, despair, and reason.

Robert Coover has published fourteen novels, three books of short fiction, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Playboy, amongst many other publications. A long-time professor at Brown University, he makes his home Providence, Rhode Island.

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.

West Condon, small-town USA, five years later: the Brunists are back, loonies and cretins aplenty in tow, wanting it all--sainthood and salvation, vanity and vacuity, God's fury and a good laugh--for the end is at hand.

The Brunist Day of Wrath, the long-awaited sequel to the award-winning The Origin of the Brunists, is both a scathing indictment of fundamentalism and a careful examination of a world where religion competes with money, common sense, despair, and reason.

Robert Coover has published fourteen novels, three books of short fiction, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Playboy, amongst many other publications. A long-time professor at Brown University, he makes his home Providence, Rhode Island.

Robert Coover, father of modern American experimental fiction, returns with Stepmother, a masterful reimagining of the fairy-tale tradition. There is magic, there are princes, there are painful castrations. There is also beauty, and true love, of a sort.

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. Here, in this selection of his best stories, 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, Coover cuts to the core of how realism works.

Lucky Pierre is the most famous man in Cinecity, where pornography is the basis of social norms and the mayoral motto is Pro Bono Pubis. He walks to work (the studio where his films are made) in the winter cold, icicles tipping his constantly exposed and engorged penis, and every small interaction provides another opportunity for exercising his prurient art.

This vision of a sexualized universe is unique in that social power (and the power to direct, rather than merely appear in, these sex-films) belongs entirely to women. Each chapter (or reel) of the book is headed with the name of one of nine women (so, in reality, they are muses, but they are also the artists), and each bears her aesthetic stamp--whether the dominatrix mayor, the experimental avant-garde filmmaker, the ribald cartoonist who reanimates him with her pen when he has been left by the mayor in a snowbank to freeze, the wife who makes tender home sex movies, etc. Lucky Pierre himself seems to have no free will, indeed, no existence outside his films. He is commanded by these women, and by the overwhelming impulses of his prodigiously endowed organ.

The book is a collection of fantasies--a man entering his office instantly begins acrobatically copulating with the receptionist on her desk; a piano teacher administers discipline to his nubile young female students; a castaway discovered by the Nine Muses, who have never seen a man before and quickly begin to test his unfamiliar parts; an engagement party turns into a frenzied bacchanal; a wedding into a sadomasochistic ritual and then a chase scene. But satisfaction is complicated. Pierre is often made ridiculous, a clown as much as a leading man, and always, everything that happens to him is seen; there is no part of his life that is not, potentially, a film. Several times, he attempts to escape, but he is always recaptured and punished--or his escape is proven never to be real in the first place. For example, he joins up with the Extars, a guerrilla group of squatters who adopt him as Crazy Leg, their leader; with them, in particular Lottie, their young leading lady, he rediscovers the vivid joys of life as a sexual outlaw--including copulating with her on the trapeze of a circus. But he can never escape the tentacles of the mayor and the legit industry of Cinecity. Later he is offered the chance to rejoin the Extars, his internalization of his new status won't allow it--if it was ever a real choice.

Are these Pierre's fantasies? But in a world in which he does not own his own life or his body, where the past can be rewritten as easily as the dialogue can be faked in a redub of one of his scenes, his thoughts are not even his own. Even so, L.P. continues his perhaps futile attempts to define his own destiny. In the end, grown old and decrepit, he learns his next film is titled The Final Fuck--i.e., it's the end of his career. Morose and attempting to avoid the inevitable, he flees to a showing of his own work, which ends up leading him, now resigned to his fate, back to the soundstage--where, in the end, he rediscovers ecstasy, and the closure of his destiny.

At the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape sivilization and light out for the Territory. In Robert Coover's Huck Out West, also wrote by Huck, the boys do just that, 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.

Casey returns to bat. The Pied Piper pipes again. Little Red Ridinghood is
not safe yet.

Robert Coover returns with a new collection of short fiction, reexamining
our shared narrative heritage -- myths, fairytales, and favorite childhood
stories -- unearthing the underlying hope, fear, and wonder at their core.
Simultaneously playful and systematic, satirical and empathetic, Coover uses
the stories of our past to point towards a fiction of the future.