Featured Author: Robert Coover
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times

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In This Feature

Reviews of Robert Coover's Earlier Books

Articles About and By Robert Coover

Related Links

Sven Birkerts Reviews 'Ghost Town' (September 27, 1998)

First Chapter: 'Ghost Town'

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Stathis Orphanos/ Holt and Company

Robert Coover

REVIEWS OF ROBERT COOVER'S EARLIER BOOKS:

'The Origin of the Brunists' (1966)
"Robert Coover writes his first novel as if he doesn't expect to make it to a second. Everything goes into it, including plots for several grim short stories and more social novels . . . If he can somehow control his Hollywood giganticism and focus his vision of life, he may become heir to Dreiser or Lewis."

'The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Prop.' (1968)
". . . a fine baseball novel, the best I can remember in an admittedly thin field, and based obviously on a study of the texts. . . . not to read it because you don't like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don't like boarding houses . . ."

'Pricksongs & Descants,' reviewed by William H. Gass (1969)
"Most of the fictions in Robert Coover's remarkable new volume are solitaires -- sparkling, many-faceted."

'The Public Burning' (1977)
"[A]ll vigorous satire is simplistic and excessive, and this book is an extraordinary act of moral passion, a destructive device that will not easily be defused."

'Spanking the Maid' (1982)
"The text consists of the permutations of a single event, a spanking: variations by Coover on a theme set by an anonymous pornographer. . . . Can this be any good? It can, it is. From the start, Coover engages the important questions."

'Gerald's Party' (1985)
". . . Coover has both compressed and exploded his signature techniques well beyond comprehension."

'A Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This,' reviewed by Edmund White (1987)
". . . what he's doing is enlarging his literary technique by forcing it to assimilate cinematic conventions and to approximate filmic style. To say so perhaps makes the book sound stiff, but 'A Night at the Movies' is as vivacious and entertaining as it is one hundred percent American."

'Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?' (September 27, 1987)
"Coover is one of our masters now. The tumultuous, Babylonian exuberance of his mind is fueled and directed by his equally passionate craftsmanship. He seems to be able to do anything, and this funny, bitter, human book is fair proof of it."

'Pinocchio in Venice,' reviewed by Anthony Burgess (1991)
"Coover is one of America's quirkiest writers, if by 'quirky' we mean an unwillingness to abide by ordinary fictional rules and a conviction that a novel is primarily a verbal artifact unconvertible to other media."

'John's Wife' (1996)
". . . the prose . . . feels overworked: too much fuss, not enough fineness. If I emphasize style over content, it's because any sizable claims for the book must lie in its presentation; the plot is a rambling, reiterated and squalid affair."

'Briar Rose' (1997)
". . . [a] rich and intricate set of variations on the old fairy tale . . . this short and almost perfect book seems -- paradoxically, blissfully -- to go on forever."

ARTICLES ABOUT AND BY ROBERT COOVER:

Robert Coover Reviews Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (December 8, 1968)
Coover's review of Bartlett's book of familiar quotations is constructed from familiar quotations from Bartlett's book.

Stage: Robert Coover's 'The Kid' Opens (November 18, 1972)
". . . the play at times is quite lively. Unfortunately, it is also extremely simple. The one point it makes about legendary western heroes is almost too obvious to be made, and the writing, while fluent and boisterous, is never especially interesting."

Robert Coover Reviews Garbiel García Márquez's 'In Evil Hour' (November 11, 1979)
". . . nearly a quarter of a century after its conception, 'In Evil Hour' appears at last in English . . . Given its wit, perception, imaginative richness and easy accessibility, it is astonishing that we have had to wait so long."

Robert Coover Reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's 'The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta' (February 2, 1986)
"For Mr. Vargas Llosa, the central feature of the total novel, aside from its encyclopedic pursuit of an all-encompassing overview, is its unassailable autonomy: its own internal coherence and integrity is ultimately what matters, not its relationship to any supposed 'real' world."

The Avant-Garde Ex Post Facto (April 9, 1988)
Robert Coover brought together a conference of "iconoclasts with tenure."

The End of Books, by Robert Coover (June 21, 1992)
"True freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text."

Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer, by Robert Coover (August 29, 1993)
"The potential of this fascinating new reading and writing medium has scarcely been glimpsed," says Coover in this essay about the hyperfiction of Stuart Moulthrop, Michael Joyce and Mary-Kim Arnold.

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