Signed by Robert Coover & T.C. Boyle, Brand New, First Edition, First Printing, Hardcover/Dust Jacket, List: $26.95, 416 + xii pages
Going for a Beer
Selected Short Fictions
by
Robert Coover
(February 4, 1932 - October 5, 2024)
Introduction by
T.C. Boyle
(December 2, 1948 - present)
Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Coover's first novel was The Origin of the Brunists, in which the sole survivor of a mine disaster starts a religious cult. His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., deals with the role of the creator. The eponymous Waugh, a shy, lonely accountant, creates a baseball game in which rolls of the dice determine every play, and dreams up players to attach those results to. His 1969 short story collection Pricksongs and Descants contains the celebrated metafictional story "The Babysitter," which was adapted into the 1995 movie of the same title, directed by Guy Ferland.
Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to stage the execution of the Rosenbergs as a public event in Times Square. As reviewer Thomas R. Edwards wrote in The New York Times, "Astonishingly, Nixon is the most interesting and sympathetic character in the story."
Coover's 1982 novella Spanking the Maid remained one of his favorites; asked in an interview "Which of your books will get you into heaven?", Coover quipped, "Spanking the Maid. God's deep into S&M." A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (1987), offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with the same doggedness with which he pursued political success in this reality. The theme anthology A Night at the Movies includes the story "You Must Remember This", a piece about Casablanca that features an explicit description of what Rick and Ilsa did when the camera wasn't on them. Pinocchio in Venice returns to mythical themes.
In 1987 he was the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2021, Coover, in a collaboration with Art Spiegelman, released Street Cop.
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions was published on February 6, 2018.
First Edition, First Printing, hand SIGNED by Robert Coover & T.C. Boyle, to full title page.
No inscription; two full signatures only.From an event featuring Robert Coover and Christopher Boucher In Cambridge, MA on November 17, 2019. And from an event featuring T.C. Boyle and Audrey Schulman on April 9, 2019 in New York City.BONUS: The complete eight-page program (see photos 12 & 13) from the T.C. Boyle event is included.Please only bid if you will pay within five days of auction's end.
All domestic sales of $25 or more will be wrapped and shipped in a box.
If requested, there is a $1.00 surcharge for all domestic orders below $25 shipped in a box.
Shipping & Handling for USPS Media Mail is $5.49 (includes USPS Tracking).
Additional books shipped together via USPS Media Mail are $1.50 per book.
Shipping & Handling for USPS Priority Mail Flat Rate envelope is $9.95 (includes USPS Tracking).
Shipping & Handling for USPS Priority Mail International Flat Rate envelope is $46.95.
I provide the highest quality author signed, first edition books.
100% authentic guaranteed - This is my COA "Certificate of Authenticity". I won't sell any signed book that I'm not 100% sure is hand signed by the author. I attended the event featuring Robert Coover and Christopher Boucher in Cambridge, MA on November 17, 2019. I also attended the event featuring T.C. Boyle and Audrey Schulman on April 9, 2019 in New York City.
I'm not happy unless you are!
Please email any questions.
Thanks!
Book Description
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: Selected Short Fictions confirm Coover’s reputation as "one of America’s greatest literary geniuses" (Alan Moore).
"A mix-tape of variations and a fugue on time from a postmodern master....In Coover’s fictional universe, familiar tales and conventional genres are made new, tinged with shuddering wonder and titillating humor." ―Yu-Yun Hsieh, The New York Times Book Review"Trickster, tinkerer, inventor, parodist....Coover is among the pioneer mutants of American literature, to borrow a phrase Leslie Fiedler bestowed upon William S. Burroughs. You catch his rebel DNA in the work of writers as disparate as George Saunders and Sheila Heti and Donald Antrim." ―Dwight Garner, New York Times"A riveting, elusive, phantasmagoric, weird, delightful, grim and farcical collection....Coover’s imagination is so rich, demonic, outrageously funny and passionate that as you emerge from one story, you can’t wait for the next one to begin....Coover...is one of our best writers, and Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions underscores that judgment with boundless desire and imaginative bliss." ―Providence Journal"Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions is astonishing....[Coover] has managed to be literature’s guardian at the same time he has been its re-inventor and alternative...He is both astounding and fun to read at the same time." ―The Buffalo News"A career-topping marvel, Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions finds meaning in the wildness of the cultural subconscious." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)"An excellent opportunity to look back at the development of a true original.... Coover can still work at the top of his game." ―Booklist"Coover's influence endures, and Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions provides good evidence for why that should be so." ―Kirkus Reviews
Your request is processing... Please Wait