books in order

Robert Coover Books In Order

Origin of the Brunists Books In Order

  1. The Origin of the Brunists (1967)
  2. The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014)

Novels

  1. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968)
  2. The Public Burning (1977)
  3. A Political Fable (1980)
  4. Charlie in the House of Rue (1980)
  5. Spanking the Maid (1981)
  6. Gerald’s Party (1986)
  7. Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (1987)
  8. Pinocchio in Venice (1991)
  9. John’s Wife (1996)
  10. Briar Rose (1997)
  11. Ghost Town (1998)
  12. The Grand Hotels (Of Joseph Cornell) (2002)
  13. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (2002)
  14. Stepmother (2004)
  15. Noir (2010)
  16. Huck Out West (2017)

Omnibus

  1. Briar Rose / Spanking the Maid (2011)

Collections

  1. Pricksongs and Descants (1969)
  2. A Theological Position (1972)
  3. In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters (1983)
  4. Aesops Forest and the Plot of Mice (1986)
  5. A Night At the Movies (1987)
  6. Baseball and the Game of Life (1990)
  7. A Child Again (2005)
  8. Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady (2011)
  9. Watchlist (2016)
  10. Going For a Beer (2018)

Chapbooks

  1. Hair O’ the Chine (1979)

Plays

  1. After Lazarus (1980)

Novellas

  1. The Babysitter (2014)
  2. The Cat in the Hat for President (2018)

Anthologies edited

Origin of the Brunists Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Chapbooks Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Robert Coover Books Overview

The Origin of the Brunists

Originally published in 1966 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.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.

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.

Spanking the Maid

‘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.

Gerald’s Party

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

Internationally renowned author Robert Coover returns with a major new novel set in Venice and featuring one of its most famous citizens, Pinocchio. The result is a brilliant philosophical discourse on what it means to be human; a hilarious, bawdy adventure; and a fitting tribute to the history, grandeur, and decay of Venice itself.

John’s Wife

The bestselling author of ‘The Public Burning’ spins a darkly magical tale about life in an ordinary small town and the woman who casts a spell on its inhabitants.

Briar Rose

Coover puts his unique spin on one of the oldest and best known of all fairy tales, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, telling the story 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.

Ghost Town

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.’

The Grand Hotels (Of Joseph Cornell)

Fiction. Robert Coover takes us through the looking glass of Joseph Cornell’s boxes into a world of ‘Grand Hotels’ we never dreamed of. Rooms are accessed via ferris wheel. They open onto crystal cages, night voyages, sand fountains. They lead us back to childhood, to forgotten games, to sleeping princess who do not await a prince and, finally, home, poor heart. Funny and wistful by turns, these brilliant vignettes explore the nature of desire and the melancholy of fulfillment. As the author says, they are also an ‘architectural portrait of the artist,’ with biographical information ‘built into the construction of the text like girders, brickwork or decor.’ ‘A set of brochures to the marvelous. Coover, with magnificent simplicity, orchestrates countering strands of pathos and wonder, decadence and innocent glee, in these 10 short chapters that are sure to make anyone permanently dissatisfied with the run down bed and breakfast we call planet Earth’ Publishers Weekly.

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre

A virtuosic performance by one of ‘our most venturesome metafictional fabulists’ The New York Times Book Review, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is the culmination of a project Coover has been working on for more than a quarter of a century. It is a tour de force that confirms why Coover is one of our preeminent writers. The place is Cinecity, the frozen meta city where Lucky Pierre plies his trade. Part po*rn star, part clown, Pierre is quite literally defined by his films. Following the city motto Pro bono pubis each of Pierre’s nine muse directors creates her own sexual galaxy with Pierre the star of her show. Pierre becomes a naive castaway, a naughty little boy, a submissive slave, a lovestruck hubby, a sexual outlaw, a dirty cartoon, a sex machine, and more. But what will happen when the film ends? A sparkling meditation on how both sex and stories compel and invent us in both magical and violent ways The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a masterpiece from one of America’s best writers. ‘Of all the postmodernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious.’ Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ‘The supreme chronicler of the unreality of American life.’ Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle ‘Coover couldn’t write a dull note to the milkman.’ John Schulian, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Stepmother

Robert Coover, a father of modern American experimental fiction, returns with ‘Stepmother,’ a masterful re imagining of the fairy tale tradition. There is magic, there are princes, and painful castrations. Also, there is beauty and true love, of a sort. Stepmother is illustrated by Michael Kupperman, bound in soft cloth, and stamped with precious metals.

Noir

With impeccable skill, Robert Coover, one of America’s pioneering postmodernists, has turned the classic detective story inside out. Here Coover is at the top of his form; and Noir is a true page turner wry, absurd, and desolate. You are Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. A mysterious young widow hires you to find her husband’s killer if he was killed. Then your client is killed and her body disappears if she was your client. Your search for clues takes you through all levels of the city, from classy lounges to lowlife dives, from jazz bars to a rich sex kitten’s bedroom, from yachts to the morgue. ‘The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow’ unfolds over five days aboveground and three or four in smugglers’ tunnels, though flashback and anecdote, and expands time into something much larger. You don’t always get the joke, though most people think what’s happening is pretty funny.

Pricksongs and Descants

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.

A Night At the Movies

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.

Baseball and the Game of Life

15 fine stories by WP Kinsella, Robert Coover, Jay Neugeboren, William Stafford, Henry Roth, David Nemec and others on the human condition near the baseball diamond. Printed letterpress in sepia ink on 80 lb. Mohawk Vellum. First rate baseball literature bibliography.

A Child Again

Casey returns to bat. The Pied Piper pipes again. Little Red Riding Hood is not safe yet. Robert Coover returns with a new collection of short fiction, reexamining our shared narrative heritage myths, fairy tales, and favorite childhood stories and unearthing the underlying hope, fear, and wonder at their core. Playful yet systematic, satirical yet empathetic, Coover uses the stories of our past to point towards a fiction of the future.

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