Kirjahaku

In his carnivalesque and riotously inventive Pricksongs & Descants Robert Coover remakes old stories: of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty (who married her Beast and spends a lifetime suffering his doggy stink). And he reshapes his own: a man makes repeating, re-imagined journeys in an office elevator (while his fellow riders taunt and tempt him), and in the seminal, fractal 'The Babysitter' every moment in a single night is played and replayed, every hope and threat of sex and violence done and undone. Coover's dark, wilfil, comic imagination revels brilliantly in contradictions, a master of chaos.

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.

These two novellas by the groundbreaking, fearless, and immeasurably influential Robert Coover are dirty, funny and brilliant. In Briar Rose a sleeping beauty is trapped in an enchantment for a hundred years, dreaming of stories in which someone like her wakes up disappointed, or becomes a mother, or is stripped and defiled. And, as she dreams, outside, failed princes die and hang their remains on the thorns of a briar hedge. In Spanking the Maid a maid and her master are each committed to their own hard service: she, attempting to perform her simple duties without error; he, supplying punishment by rod, belt, hairbrush, whip, cane and slipper when she inevitably fails. These tales of desire are Coover at his most darkly playful.

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.

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.

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.

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).

A very old professor returns to Venice to finish work on his final book, but as he searches for the proper ending, he slowly begins to turn back into wood

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."

Probes the personalities assembled at a party when the murder of a guest named Ros transforms an ordinary evening

Portrays the erotic relationship of a man and his maid, whom he repeatedly and ritualistically disciplines for failing to perform her cleaning duties perfectly

Briar Rose, a brilliant recreation of the timeless Sleeping Beauty story, 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.

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."

This volume presents a collection of short stories based on traditional fairy tales that expose the futility of idealism.

The lone survivor of a catastrophic mine explosion announces that the end of the world is at hand and begins a new cult that, sweeping the mining towns, gathers believers in anticipation of the Coming of the End of the World. Reprint.

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.

En man vaknar upp med morgonstånd, halvt förvirrad av nattens drömmar. Hembiträdet går runt och pysslar, småsjungande gamla psalmer. Men varför måste hon alltid göra fel? Varje morgon är det något hon glömt, om så bara trosorna. Och han måste bestraffa henne igen och igen. Piskan viner: SMASK! SCHVITS! Och hembiträdet kvider: "Tack, snälla herrn!" Amerikanen Robert Coover (f 1931) tillhör

Loisteliaan akateemisen uran Amerikassa tehnyt ikääntynyt Pinokkio palaa kotiin Venetsiaan kirjoittamaan magnum opuksensa viimeisen luvun. Mutta onko takaisin puuksi muuttuva professori liian myöhään liikkeellä? Ja miten Venetsia ottaa vastaan oman, kauan poissa olleen poikansa?Robert Cooverin postmoderni satu on romaani elämästä ja kuolemasta, ystävyydestä ja rakkaudesta, taiteesta ja ihmisyydestä. Niteessä on mukana myös Cooverin kuuluisa novelli "Lapsenvahti" ja kirjailijan työtä valottava essee "Tarina, myytti, kirjailija".Robert Coover (s. 1932) on amerikkalaisen kokeilevan kirjallisuuden kärkinimiä. Hänen ensimmäinen romaaninsa The Origin of the Brunists ilmestyi 1966 ja se sai huomattavalle esikoisteokselle myönnettävän William Faulkner -palkinnon. Cooverin laaja tuotanto käsittää romaaneja, novelleja ja yhden näytelmän.

Robert Cooverin uusin romaani Huck lännen mailla jatkaa Huckleberry Finnin tarinaa siitä, mihin se Mark Twainilta jäi. Huck ratsastaa Pony Expressin lähettinä, taistelee sisällissodassa ja asuu lakota-intiaanien parissa, mutta toisin kuin kaverinsa Tom Sawyer, ei pysty kotiutumaan oikein minnekään.Mark Twainille ja veijariromaanin perinteelle kunniaa tekevä romaani päivittää Huckleberry Finnin ja Tom Sawyerin uudelle vuosituhannelle. Omaan häpeämättömään tyyliinsä Coover kuvaa ihmisen raadollisuutta niin ettei lukija tiedä, pitäisikö itkeä vai nauraa.