Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid
Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid

Author: Robert Coover

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2011-04-28

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 014119300X

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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.

Briar Rose
Briar Rose

Author: Robert Coover

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 9780802135414

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An allegorical retelling of Sleeping Beauty. It features a princess who dreams of a succession of kissing princes, and a fairy who inhabits her dreams, regaling her with legends of other sleeping beauties. A look at the power of romantic desire.

Briar Rose
Briar Rose

Author: Jane Yolen

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2002-03-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780765342300

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An American journalist is trapped in Nazi Germany in this variation on the Sleeping Beauty theme.

Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page
Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page

Author: Stephane Vanderhaeghe

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1564788423

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Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism. By portraying characters lost in surroundings they often fail to grasp, Coover's work playfully enacts a "(melo)drama of cognition" that mirrors the reader's own desire to interpret and make sense of texts in unequivocal ways. This tendency in Coover's writing is indicative of a larger refusal of the ready-made, of the once-and-for-all or the authoritative, celebrating instead, in its generosity, the widening of possibilities—thus inevitably forcing the reader-critic to acknowledge the arbitrariness and artificiality of her responses.

Understanding Robert Coover
Understanding Robert Coover

Author: Brian Evenson

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781570034824

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This text takes on the work of Robert Coover, a major figure of postmodern metafiction. In an analysis of Coover's short stories and novels, it demonstrates how Coover writes in several different modes that cross over into one another.

Pricksongs and Descants
Pricksongs and Descants

Author: Robert Coover

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2000-01-05

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780802136671

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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.

Community Memories
Community Memories

Author: Winona L. Fletcher

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2003-11-07

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780916968304

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"While this is a glimpse of Frankfort's African American community, it has much in common with other Black communities, especially those in the South. Although much in the collection that produced this work - both photographic and oral history - is nostalgic, it ultimately demonstrates that change is constant, producing both negative and positive results."--BOOK JACKET.