In this new collection of interlocking short fiction the author of "Gerald's Party" turns on their heads the assumptions and conventions of the silver screen

A Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This

Literature & Fiction

COOVER, Robert

Short Stories & Anthologies

Collier Books

Interweaves the fate of a cast of passionate--and lunatic--idealists of the Depression Era Left, and the rise and fall of a poet, womanizer, actor, union sympathizer and All-American football star known as Gloomy Gus

Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (Collier Fiction Series)

Pricksongs and Descants

Genre Fiction

Penguin Classics

A satirical fable with a rootless and helpless accountant as the protagonist. Alone in his apartment, he spends all his nights and weekends playing an intricate baseball game of his own invention. The author has won the William Faulkner Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

Literary

Hart-Davis

Pricksongs & Descants

Dutton Books

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

The Origin of the Brunists: A Novel (Norton Paperback Fiction)

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

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

Huck Out West: A Novel

Humor & Satire

W.W.Norton&Company

“A mixtape of variations and a fugue on time from a postmodern master.… Familiar tales and conventional genres are made new, tinged with shuddering wonder and titillating humor.” ―Yu-Yun Hsieh, The New York Times Book Review
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.

Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions

United States

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

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).

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by COOVER, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by COOVER, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by COOVER, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This

Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (Collier Fiction Series)

Pricksongs and Descants

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop

Pricksongs & Descants

The Origin of the Brunists: A Novel (Norton Paperback Fiction)

Huck Out West: A Novel

Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions

Huck Out West: A Novel

Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions