Bøger af Robert Coover

Radical and racy, Robert Coover‿s Coover Stories is a new collection of incisive, inventive works from the postmodern master.When Robert Coover‿s first collection Pricksongs & Descants came out in 1969, his shortstory “The Babysitter,â€? took the literary world by storm. Described as “metafiction at its best,â€?his work is taught in classrooms more than half a century later, no less relevant‿andirreverent‿than at its debut. Provocative, experimental, and biting, Coover‿s darkly satiricwriting has pushed the avant-garde to its limits and sired a generation of postmodernists. Coover Stories is the fourth short story collection from Robert Coover. Drawing on decades of experience, the William FaulknerFoundation Award‿winning writer continues to shock and engage his readers with his wit, style,and keen critical eye for the paradoxes of modernity.

A virtuosic performance, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a masterpiece. It is set in Cinecity, the frozen capital of an unnamed utopia -- or is it dystopia? -- where Lucky Pierre plies his trade. Part porn star, part clown, part everyman, Lucky has no life outside his films. Through the lenses of his nine female muse-directors, Lucky becomes a naive castaway, a submissive slave, a child star in a barnyard frolic, a love-struck suburban hubby, a dirty cartoon, a sex-pilgrim in virtual reality, and much much more. A sparkling love song to the magic of moving pictures, and a meditation -- both joyous and serious -- on how sex compels and invents us, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a spectacular tour de force from an American master.

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."

A collection of the best short fictions from the grandmaster of postmodernism.

"An audacious and revisionary sequel to Twain's masterpiece. It is both true to the spirit of Twain and quintessentially Cooveresque." -Times Literary Supplement

Our leading postmodernist novelist turns his iconoclastic eye to a great American classic in this sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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.

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.

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.

"Though Coover's message is bleak, his delivery is wonderfully comic" (Bharati Mukherjee, "The Globe & Mail" (Toronto)) in this spare, tantalizing, and perfect book, named by Daphne Merkin in "The New Yorker" as one of her "favorite" S/M books.