Robert Coover Books

This item is spectacular in every way. This book comes in a leather case that, by itself is truly amazing. As expensive as this item is, it is really worth every penny.

DOWNSIDE
This item is huge and weighs almost 40 pounds so Amazon charges like $12 in shipping costs. Thankfully, I was able to purchase this from a 3rd party seller on Amazon and saved quite a bit of money when I added up the item cost and shipping (the 3rd party seller only wanted $3.99 for shipping)!! It came real fast in perfect condition. I am thrilled with this purchase.

Well worth the discounted price offered by Amazon. For anyone/everyone who is a fan of Playboy Magazine, and not just for the articles, I recommend this book highly (if one can afford it)! The women are spectacular, and the photography is the best in the business. The protective leather suitcase is a really nice touch, and the quality of the paper is also excellent. (It weighs a lot, though). Again, well worth the $$!

I frequently ask this question: Who had the most fun in the twentieth century? The answer I've maintained for some time is: Mick Jagger. (Keith would be second, but I disqualify him because I don't think he remembers much.) Hugh Hefner would be the next in line. What a career. What a legacy. Some people might maintain that his legacy is vacuous and that his career is insipid. I disagree, and immediately sense either jealousy or ignorance. Hefner has done wonderful things for women (as well as us men, obviously), women's rights, and countless other charities and causes, First Amedment and beyond. His decades of frolicking with babes only a fraction of his age is a well-deserved reward for his numerous efforts on various fronts, and thereby advancing the notions of freedom and enlightenment. Hefner is straight out of an Ayn Rand novel, a bold visionary who believes life is to be lived for ample doses of work and pleasure, and whose self-indulgence has as a byproduct vast benefit for his fellow man. (True, I do think his epic life-story would have a fabulous ending if he now married a woman close to his age, and made a proclamation of some sort advancing romantic ideals, to work in conjunction with his previous accomplishments relating to sexual idealism.)

I mention the man who is the publisher of this book because I thought of him and his decades of accomplishment as I flipped through each and every page of this vast tome. Imagine, the first picture is of no one other than Marilyn Monroe! But my personal favorite was about a year later: Bettie Page! I was also struck by the photo of Dorothy Stratten. There are lots of stories here, lots of history. Indeed, most of the shots are very appealing, and actually much sexier than I had remembered. (True, the recent shots of girls who have shaved themselves are, in my opinion, grotesque.) Although my favorites are somewhere between 1965 and 1978, each decade has its appeal. These pictures really jump out at you, the printing quality is first-rate, and the vast volume of beautiful female imagery is probably unmatched by any other book anywhere. It took me almost two hours to flip through these pages.

The briefcase: I was curious if it was real "leather." No, it is not. Is it kind of cheesey? Yes, very. The dilemma posed by the briefcase is that you have to find a place to stash the darned thing. You can't really place it on a bookshelf. Really, I wish they had built a slip-case for the book instead of this vinyl, goofy briefcase. However, the briefcase is kind of useful because the book is so heavy that it otherwise would be cumbersome to move about. But the thin vinyl reminds me of an old cassette tape case, and I suspect that before long the vinyl will crack or get holes punctured in it. The book itself, however, in contrast, is very solid with a nice cloth binding. I do wish it had a nice ribbon book mark, because there was one babe in particular in 1978 who really deserved a rigorous marking! (I guess I'll just have to flip through this thing again soon and re-locate her.)

All told, this book is perhaps the best single summary of an incredible publishing legacy. Thank you, Mr. Hefner, for all you've done to enrich our lives the last sixty years. While many of us primarily read Playboy during our "fraternity years," the lessons taught in this magazine about living the good life, and being a gentleman, have endured long after that.

For awhile the price was dropping by about $10 a day, as if they were trying to find the price people were willing to pay -- for a couple of days it listed as low as $170, and then it suddenly jumped back up to $315 (and now I'm regretting that I didn't grab that price while I could). If nobody buys it at the current price maybe it'll start dropping again. It's worth a try...

This is a piece of history. I was around when the first playboy was issued. So that means a long time.This comes in a black briefcase with combination locks and a raised playboy bunny. Just the case alone is stunning.The book inside contains all the centerfolds unfolded in real size.The cover and binding are first rate. The pages inside are printed on top notch paper. This is well worth the money. This book and case weigh 37.5 pounds. Once you see it you will realize you have a true collectors item if that is what you are into. I debated on whether I should spend the money on it and took a chance, because I have three other playboy books,now I am glad I did, because you will not see any other kind of book bound like this and in a case like this, let alone for the money. It is unique among any type of book.

It is not something you buy just for the pictures, you could have saved all the single issues and have them all, but of course they would be folded and in this book they are not. It is something that you buy for the volume, binding and case itself. A piece of history, that usually would never be produced in any other book. Think of it a large page from every issue of this magazine. I doubt that any other magazine of any kind will ever do what Playboy has done. This is a show stopper as a book.

I stopped reading Playboy because I considered the girls to be too one dimensional and the pictures to be to contrived. They don't seem real. I like my women to look like women, not fake breasts, shaved pubic hair and airbrushed plastic dolls. But I did buy this book because of the quality, besides a lot of the centerfolds in the earlier issues looked more like real women before Hef got old and silly.

This collection of short stories by Robert Coover is nothing short of genius. First of all, let me say that I don't usually read short story collections beginning to end. This collection, however, I read cover to cover. It consumed me. The power of Coover's prose cuts deeper than the fun, mercurial language initially suggests-- you'll find yourself thinking about these stories as you ride to work; you'll find yourself comparing them to real life situations; you'll find yourself mentioning them in conversation; you'll find yourself re-reading them, and enjoying them even more the second time.
While every story varies wildly in voice, tone, and subject matter, they all seem to be striking at a similar theme, which is the pain of growing old, the death of childhood illusions and fantasies. While this theme isn't new, Coover always puts a fresh, somewhat sick twist on it.This book about the years after the fairy tale ends, the denoument in which Alice is still stuck in Wonderland, now grown fat and irritable, her hormones raging out of control. By inverting the framework of stories that we have all read and enjoyed as children, Coover cuts directly into the deep longing to return to childhood that each of us possesses. Moreover, he never fails to surprise, to take the unexpected position and flesh it out with astounding understanding.
To top it all off, Mcsweeney's (as usual) has crafted a gorgeous book to house these stories. If nothing else, buy it just to have one of the most beautiful hard cover books published in the last ten years on your bookshelf.
This one's a winner. Check it out.

Robert Coover is one of the most celebrated writers of our time, for novels such as The Public Burning and for short fiction collected in books such as Pricksongs and Descants. Coover has always been something of a fabulist, and in A Child Again he is overtly working that vein. The stories are reimaginings of fairy tales, children's stories, a song ("Puff the Magic Dragon"), puzzles. There is even a depiction of a stick figure visiting our world. The title of the collection suggests a return to childhood - perhaps even a "second childhood" - but from the viewpoint of age, a viewpoint often cynical, other times knowing or accepting.

Indeed perhaps the dominant theme is old age - perhaps not a surprise from a 77-year-old writer. (Though to be sure some of these stories were first published decades ago.) Story after story looks at characters from a familiar tale grown very old. The collection opens with "Sir John Paper Returns to Honah-Lee", about the aging Jackie Paper visiting his childhood friend Puff the Magic Dragon once again. And it closes with "Aesop's Forest", which depicts the death of Aesop the fabulist along with the death of the characters in his forest, particularly a very decrepit lion. The story is sad and funny and cynical in equal measure - which could be said of many of the stories here.

One of my favorites is "Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock". Again, an aging character returns to the fantasy world she visited as a youth. Alice, apparently menopausal, flabby, incontinent, and otherwise afflicted with the ills of the elderly, finds herself again in unchanging Wonderland. Coover very cleverly depicts the characters of Wonderland from a slant viewpoint, and very movingly but not sentimentally depicts Alice's regrets and frustration.

Not every story insists on aging characters. "The Dead Queen" is a "what happens after happily ever after" story, in which Prince Charming begins to be concerned about Snow White's true character as they bury her tortured stepmother. "The Last One", another favorite of mine, is the story of Bluebeard from the point of view of Bluebeard - paranoidly convinced that his lovely new wife will disobey him as all the others have, by visiting his secret charnel room. But there is a nice twist buried in the close.

Coover is also fascinated by games and metafictional tricks. Three stories are presented as puzzles: a riddle, a cryptogram, and most humorously, a jigsaw puzzle, "Suburban Jigsaw", in which the tabs and slots of the puzzle seem representative of the sexual habits of the adulterous characters of the title suburb. Even cleverer, perhaps, is "Heart Suit", a story presented as fifteen cards (an introduction, a joker, and the heart suit) in a pocket at the back of the book. The story concerns the mystery of who stole the tarts the Queen of Hearts baked for the King. It is designed to be read with the cards shuffled in any order (except for the first and last). I tried a few possible orders and it works quite well - the fact that the guilty party might be one of several suspects is part of the point.

I haven't touched on many of the stories here - such as "The Presidents", which hilariously views Presidents as a rather unpleasant species of animal, or "The Return of the Dark Children", a powerful look at the guilty response of the parents of Hamelin to the loss of their children to the Pied Piper. The book is outstanding - clever throughout without forgetting to mean something, cynical but still sympathetic to its characters, and excellently written, in long carefully constructed paragraphs and a quite individual voice.

Coover is a master, and this is his masterpiece of short story writing. these reworkings and absurdist tales are so well written and funny that i've been obsessed with this book for over ten years (i may have some problems!). read it.

_Pricksongs and Descants_ (P&D) is the book which seems to have inspired Robert Coover's current book _The Awakening_ (please refer to http://search.nytimes.com/books/97/02/16/reviews/970216.gorra.html for a NY times review.)

In P&D the reader will find one of the best examples of metafiction ever created. Metafiction can loosely be characterized as those fictional works that force the reader to reevaluate the role of the story they are reading, the role of themselves as the reader, as well as the role or function of the storyline and the characters themselves. It allows the reader examine a story in terms of how it relates to it's genre and the elements associated with that literary classification. Metafiction enables the reader to contextualize (and decontextualize) the roles of a particular story and it's necessary elements.

Coover examines classic tales such as Sleeping Beauty, The Babysitter, and Jonah & the Whale, reinterpreting them into new forms. What are the possible tales within each tale? With each possibility, what becomes of the original tale? The reader is left to interpret and reinterpret, considering new relationships within or between the stories. Further, the reader his/herself may well question their role in reading each of these well crafted tales. Questions arise such as, "why do we keep retelling these stories?, what makes these stories good? ...why do I find my self compelled to keep reading this?"

In the metafictional tradition (as much as one might argue anything like a tradition might exist here) of Marquez, Calvino, Borges, Pynchon, Barth and Bartheleme, Coover has staked out his own territory. P&D is a wonderful read, and a great introduction to metafiction for those who haven't read anything like this before.

It's probably safe to say most people haven't read anything like this before. Which is one half the reason this book is so appealing: It's (probably) unlike anything you've ever read. The other appealing half of P&D is the effect reading it will have on you: it's exhilarating, thought provoking and inspiring.

I give P&D a 10 and highly recommend this collection of metafiction for both newcomers to this "new tradition" and those familiar with it as well.

--Pete Wendel

Think of the infinite cycle of revenge initiated by Fellini's 8 and a half. Yes, the dream sequence! No, not the first one, the other later on when he is living in perfect harmony with all the 8 maybe 9 women of his dreams... Broadway still sings about it! Peter Greenway tried to re-movie it HIS way... Coover's way WAY outdoes them all proving that he is firmly transmodern, transcinematic, pantronic, pornoclastic, iconomorphic! Check the references. Go to imdb.com . Verify that Coover found Lucky Pierre in Herschell Gordon Lewis 1961 forgotten naive exploit of the same name which no one cared to see or comment on. Brought Pierre out of retirement to protagonize as only he could, the brunt of feminist deconstructive romp in this newly meta-Tarrantinized nitemare of romp and stomp, this de-Ramboesque purge so telling of the times.
It is Felini lionised! It is Mastroiani finally "Slavroinized"! It is the all-consumming, selfcom-summing, sum total of all male fears penned with the supreme mastery of the pen-is-my-pained-penis only Coover commands. This is a brilliant work, in more ways than anyone can find or fathom. A slap o mastery that one can only hope, has the infinity of sequels it deserves and engenders in the mind! If you have not read it yet and you are not reading it now, what the hell are you waiting for?

This was originally published in the NEW AMERICAN REVIEW in 1968 as a long story entitled, "The Cat in the Hat for President." That was the year that Richard Nixon was first elected president and, according to a grand jury, the police rioted at the Democratic National Convention, where hippies and Yippies were protesting the Vietnam War--then at its height. Coover presents the Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat as the ideal presidential candidate because he can transform himself in an instant, appearing to be one thing before one audience, another before a different audience. The story is a brilliant satire of American politics that culminates in a hallucigenic view of American history that includes much of the sex and violence generally omitted from traditional histories. In the long run, the story celebrates the energy of creation and imagination, which is also the energy of destruction and devastation, that lies at the heart of American culture. I highly recommend it.

You probably have notions about what "home" means, and those notions probably revolve around your immediate family, domestic comfort and convenience, with a dash of nostalgia. Most likely you share my sense that home has been thus for a long time, subject to the whims of fashion and demands of social hierarchy. What I learned from Witold Rybczynski is that those are very near-sighted suppositions. The modern (Western) idea of a home is very new, historically. Even the notion of "family" that occupies so much of modern political cant, and seems so central to our social organization, goes back no further than the early 18th Century. Households before that time were comprised of groups of working adults, house owners and employees and servants, plus infants. Children were farmed out as apprentices at a tender age -- even in the wealthiest households where fortunate youngsters were placed as servants to courtiers and nobles in order to learn the ropes of oligarchy. Privacy was rare. Beds were built to handle 6-8 adults and work tables often tripled as dining boards and sleeping platforms. Rybczynski artfully traces the development of the modern household, decor and furnishing, to enable a deep understanding of why we live as we do, what works and what doesn't. As an architect he reserves some of his harshest criticism for his fellows, and neatly shoots down such icons as Le Corbusier and Wright who were too hung on their brilliance to notice that things weren't working. (As I reported in my review of Stewart Brand's excellent HOW BUILDINGS LEARN, Viking, 1994, most -- if not all -- of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses leaked, badly. HOME reports that they didn't work as living quarters either.) This author's highest praise falls to the women who invented household engineering in the late 1800s, stepping into the architectural void, inventing home economics, and shaping the modern home to suit the needs of a servantless woman charged with housekeeping and child rearing. Catherine E. Beecher and Ellen Richards come in for particular commendation. Modern furniture also falls under the author's verbal axe. Designed for style instead of comfort, he describes its advent as a foolish embrace of creativity above function, and offers the detailed research in France under the Louises (Louies?), which erupted as Chippendale and Hepplewhite designs: templates which carefully noted dimensions and proportions that actually fit a human body and allowed for the constant movement necessary to ongoing comfort. The only modern chairs which come near to the standard set in those classic designs are found in the best mechanical chairs, made to be adjusted to the user's body and to flex with movement. (More often to be found in office furniture than in a home.) Altogether an illuminating look at the circumstances of our lives. For this reviewer, who spent 20 years inventing an "alternative" house from scratch, it is greatly amusing to learn that I have spent a lot of hours reinventing wheels rounded out a hundred years ago. Talk about being forced to repeat history one has failed to learn! Been there. And so it goes.

Home is an articulate, rapid reading book about the developements leading to the current concept of "home". Tying history, architecture, sociology and technology together the emerging concept of home and comfort developes in clear visualizations.
After reading this book I now appreciate the evolution of the contradictory outlooks over time and how they affect our current drives in creating our personal living spaces.

Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History Of An Idea, is an historical and informational text following the devlopment of the concept of home and discusses the psychological effects of different types of dwellings and personal space, architecture, and society. Home is a well-structured and planned tracing of society's development of the concepts of home and comfort and relates to today's audiences with a new perspective on where and how they live. One of Mr. Rybczynski's strengths as a writer is his conversational writing style and the flow of the organization of his main ideas.
Home instantly dives into the development of society's ideas of comfort and home with an almost staggering jump into a strong comparison and analysis of the four style lines of the Ralph Lauren collection. Mr. Rybczynski highlights the different aspects of the setting that Lauren creates to entice the public and the different props he uses to create this feeling of home. Home utilizes the time line approach, begining in the medieval era, to explain Ralph Lauren's heightend understanding of the public's ideas of comfort. Mr. Rybczynski also examines the work of Le Corbusier and relates the modernist movement with current modern trends.
Mr. Rybczynski's book remeinds architects and interior designers that even in today's society it is easy to get caught up in what is in style or what would make a statement rather than what is comfertable for occupants to inhabit. I recommend Mr. Rybczynski's book to anyone who would appreciate seeing their home in a whole new way.

So, I am predisposed to like Rybczynski -- his biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, "A Clearing in the Distance," is one of my favorites.

Sure enough, I liked "Home" as well. It describes the invention of the concepts of "home" and "comfort" and "domesticity." Those are not things I ever thought of as having been invented; but if Rybczynski is right, they were, and relatively recently at that.

Worth noting: My favorite chapter was the one on the Netherlands in the 1600s -- a really, really interesting society, it turns out, for a lot of different reasons.

Also: The book has lots of interesting notes on the history of furniture, especially the chair.

Finally: Above all this is a book that makes you look at familiar surroundings with new eyes.

Rybczynski's elegant prose makes "Home: A Short History" a perfect fireside companion -- not least because he'll make you think about why you positioned your most comfy chair beside the fireplace, how your nice halogen reading light has transformed your evening hours, and whether you'd ever have even been permitted to sit down at the court of a French king.

If Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" is a savage indictment of modern architecture, Rybczynski's book is no less disappointed but even more careful to show how far back in history architects went astray from the guiding principle of 'how to keep humans comfortable'. Till I read Rybczynski, I hadn't realized that 19th century women were more concerned with the sensible flow of activity from room to room in a house, and more interested in time/labor saving innovations such as electricity, than were the architects of the time: they were still preoccupied with the regularity of the façade rather than the sensible use of space inside the home.

In fact, I'd add a third book to add to your fireside reading about the home and its development in modern times: "A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder", by Michael Pollan. (His meeting with the unlucky souls who live in a Peter Eisenmann home is worth the price of admission...)

--it would look something like the shindig being thrown in Robert Coovers *Geralds Party.* Think Sartres *No Exit* but with a lot more guests, a lot more sex, and a lot more dead folks. Youre not reading this book for plot, anymore than you'd read Samuel Beckett for plot, so don't expect anything to really `happen' in the conventional sense. Nor should you expect anything to be resolved--or even make `sense.' In other words, this novel is a lot like life, only without all the humanizing illusions that ordinarily shield us from what lies just beneath. As such, Coover throws a party that is largely a battlefield of warring lusts, jealousies, rages, and largely futile yearnings after transcendence--a party that reveals the radically anti-social beneath the social conventions that draw us together. Having said that, this is an extremely funny text, a comedy, if you will, in the classical sense of that term, in the Dantesque sense, surely...this being a party that could easily be taking place in Hell, if Hell were the home of a typically married couple in suburbia, which, of course, it all too often is.

Language, too, is an important part of this novel--the sensual labyrinth of expression that words, as words, can take and Coover is a master at weaving words into a reality all their own. He has, in fact, `reinvented' the world in his unique and distinctive style which is an accomplishment only the very best writers of any generation achieve. Coover is, indeed, one of the very best, and *Geralds Party* may be his finest book.

"Gerald's Party" depicts a single evening in the life of Gerry, a married man who has opened his home to a flood of strange friends, and describes the chaotic string of strange events which occur. The book is written in real time, its 300 pages comprising a single narrative, unbroken by chapters, from the party's beginning to its end. Gerry is the narrator, proceeding from event to event, unable to control anything, and hardly able to understand anything, including himself.

The book is experimental, but does have a plot, concerning a murder-mystery at Gerry's party of strange guests. The story is told in the tradition of surrealists, however, and not a straightforward narrative. Once the reader settles into understanding how the story works, it becomes a joyful romp through mad times.

The theme of the book is very simple: life is a major mess, and it just keeps going. People eat and drink, sleep and sex, live and die, digest and waste, kill and protect, mate monogamously and share polyamorally, control themselves and let themselves go, have children and have fun, grow up and act childish, dirty and clean, dress and undress, lie and speak true, think scientifically and think artistically, fantasize and live pragmatically, search for philosophical meaning and live hedonistically for today. And they never stop! Robert Coover pushes all the buttons in the psyche of the human animal, as if writing a reference manual for an extraterrestrial, telling it: "Here's humanity. Welcome to it!"

This book is experimental and surreal, but arguably more accessible than Beckett, and certainly more earthy and explicit. (This is so Coover can push all your buttons.) It uses an interesting form of dialog occasionally: two or three different conversations interweave their lines, making it a joyful challenge to follow along, and creating interesting intersections at times. There are two dozen characters, all with their own independent dynamic, and Coover mixes them with entertaining effect. Some are consistent, such as the wife, the son, the mother-in-law, and others, who exercise their own unique idiosyncracies steadily throughout the book, like pschological points of reference interweaving with the other characters.

This book is very well done. I cannot praise it highly enough. Coover deserves immense credit for pulling it all off. Once the reader understands the story is meant to be absurd, not literal, it becomes great fun, very vivid, and memorable. Coover is extremely imaginative, and "Gerald's Party" is a fantastic riot.

In my journey through the landscape of contemporary post-modern fiction it was about time that I paid some attention to Coover's work. Based on the reviews of his novels at Amazon, I decided to give this book a try. ...

Gerald's party is a prime example of postmodern metafiction. The story and its plotline function as mere vehicles for the exploration of a number of ideas/concepts, while the fiction is expertly geared towards the reader experiencing this wild party.

Integrating elements from two movie classics -a lot from Fellini's Satyricon and a little from Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe- injecting copious amounts of de Sade in the "party scene" from Gaddis' Recognitions and appropriating the play within a play concept from Hamlet at its zenith, Gerald's party uses theatre and time to analyze the process of perception and its resulting reality. In addition, Coover provides the reader with an encore that ranks high on the list of most cynical analyses of human relationships on record.

Coover has done a masterful job of throwing the reader in a party that has too much of any imaginable thing. While reading the discourse provides a lot of fun, it takes an effort not to get lost throwing darts in the basement. Yet, this is the work of an evil genius and finishing it left me with a feeling of awe for it's creator, while not necessarily agreeing with Coover's philosophy.

So prospective reader is this a book for you? In case you belong to the fans of Fellini's masterpiece and/or have enjoyed works by Gaddis/Pynchon/Wallace/de Lillo, I would certainly join the party.

This is a very intelligent, beautifully written book; yet, for me, there just was not enough natural momentum to carry the whole thing off. Time...one of the main obsessions in the life of this novel, and the idea of Time being nonexistent, and ever the same with only spacial relations changing is one that is dwelled on by some of the characters. And that's the problem with this novel, with the idea of time thrown out the window every page read the exact same. Read any 30 pages and you will enjoy them immensly but to keep it up for 300 pages is more stamina than i could produce.

There were so many funny scenes though!! But, like a David Lynch movie, after awhile the bizzarities just become repetitive and annoying, with nothing deeper underlying them. Some of the kids from Coover's generations (Barth, Vonnegut, kind of Barthelme) seem to do things that would be more fun to think up and write than to actually read. With these guys (i hate to group, but oh well) you can almost always imagine them slyly smiling behind the page at their zany little creation or attack on the prevailing form of fiction. It often comes off as too academic.

At the same time not at all... there is way more chaos and madness than most uptight, imaginitively limited professors could ever handle, brimming in blood, unsound meditations, dizzying desire... i guess i dont know what to think about this novel... i kind of think Coover may be one of those writers who sometime down the road i will want to scream at myself for ever criticizing.

Here is a book that is apparently about decadence. All of the characters are in some way connected to the theater community and artifice is therefore their business. There is a great deal of confusion between what is real and what is feigned, imagined, projected or merely confusing. The reader sees everything through the eyes and mind of the eponymous party host. Gerald is a womanizer and a hopeless relativist. For most of the evening he tries to understand and rationalize increasingly outrageous behavior on the part of his party guests and the police who come to investigate the murder of one his party guests.

Yes, this is a murder mystery, or at least it is a parody of one. The number of dead bodies that turn up is never certain, but there at least four. The first body (and the only murder that the police investigate) is that of Ros, a bad actress and a loose woman who is much beloved by everyone at the party, male and female. She is an innocent, a creature of pure impulse and she is beautiful. But as the evening progresses you realize that no one really knows her and that she is perhaps unknowable. At some point Coover suggests that she is the personification of Truth; the police detective reveals that Ros looks exactly like a mysterious woman who he has met only in his dreams and who his therapist has told him symbolizes Truth.

Coover uses people's memories and ritual use of the body of Ros to show that this community (apparently representing all of us) has a very shakey relationship with the Truth. Ros is all things to all people. Some party guests initially keen hysterically over her loss, while others simply shake their heads and pretend to have seen it coming. In the course of the evening, however, she is reduced to a memory and her body to a stage prop and a symbol.

Coover repeatedly juxtaposes the mundane with the horrifying. Policemen eat sandwiches while they are beating recalcitrant guests. Gerald's wife shows off the sewing room to the new neighbors while he is lying on the floor of the same room unable to remove his penis from a teenager that he has just (accidentally) deflowered. In order to get better light on the shot a cameraman asks Gerald to move to one side while he is comforting his best friend, who as been shot in the heart by the police.

This is a hilarious and depressing book. If you don't have a strong stomach for irony or don't think that debauchery is funny, then it probably isn't for you. If you enjoy being told that the bourgeoise are going (have gone) to hell in a handbasket, then read with pleasure.

Robert Coover's first novel, Origin of the Brunists, shows how he won so many awards for his poetry and short fiction. This is a book you won't forget. The book throws a strange group of definitely substandard people together, adds a set of bizarre events, shakes, and comes up with the most bizarre - but plausible - religion you have ever seen. Metaphysics, virtual Forteanism, downright stoicism, you name it, it gets thrown in and sort of works. The book is a study of the individuals, not the religion, but the religion serves to hold the people together. I haven't read this book in 15 years, and I'm aching to get another copy. If you like this book, try Coover's Universal Baseball Association - J. Henry Waugh, Prop., or a collection of his poetry and shortstuff, Pricksongs and Other Delights. At least one of these is in print.

Having read Coover's later books, I was rather skeptical if his earlier ones would be as good - and was pleasantly surprised. In fact, I would rate Coover's first novel as his best work: taut, earthy and powerful, it chronicles the rise and fall of a cult group called the Brunist (following the name of the so-called founder of the group, Giovanni Bruno) and how even a small, seemingly harmless and insignificant group of people can become potentially threatening to the larger community. But what I truly admire about this novel is the slow, subtle building of the narrative terror and hysteria. Coover is indeed a master of suspense and anti-climaxes, building up very tensed episodes to end them in slick, sometimes frustrating, bathos. But this only makes the novel more rewarding as the reader is never on solid ground. The prose continuously shifts and distabilises the reader's suppositions, making it almost impossible to stop reading (this is not an exaggeration). I highly recommend this electrifying novel and hope that it will reach a very wide audience.

Toby Olson's novel is complex, and its details may seem tedious to undisciplined readers. However, for those willing to give their full attention to Olson's prose, you will be rewarded fascinating insights, rich characters, good humor, and most important the golf scene, which is easily the greatest description of the game of golf in American literature, and rises to the highest levels of prose American writers have written. Yes, the scene's that good - but you'll have to work for it. Oh yes - the book takes a funny turn toward the end, so stick with it. Overall, quite wonderful.

Golf and native americans and returning home and moving east are the themes here a great novel that ends on Cape Cod after starting somewhere out west on a golf course...

When I was in middle school, I was perhaps a little too much in love with a Nintendo football game called Tecmo Bowl. The game was great. I played out an entire season of NFL games using the video game teams, recording wins, losses, which teams made the playoffs, and keeping a running total of the player's stats for the season. I would even pretend to be the announcer, and sometimes recorded my commentary (painfully inane if I ever listened to it afterwards). Then I would go out in the back yard and reenact the highlights from each game. In many respects, I was similar to the protagonist of Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Prop., who devises an intricate version of simulated baseball that he plays in his kitchen with dice. The difference is that I was twelve. Henry is fifty-seven.

To escape from reality into a world of imagination is regarded as endearing and encouraging in children - in adults, it seems pathetic and disturbing. As the novel progresses, we see how far Henry has taken his obsession: he concocts life stories for the players, composes songs supposedly popular in the alternate reality inhabited by the UBA, conducts pretend interviews, writes newspaper articles, lines his shelves with record books, and even conflates events of his own life with the lives of the players - and vice versa. What could drive a man to do all this? Certainly not a love for the game. In fact, Henry admits that real baseball bores him. Possible explanations seem to be desire for control, intense boredom, overwhelming feelings of isolation, or simply inability to mature and face the problems of adult life.

However, we are not given a simple explanation for Henry's habit, nor are we led to believe that his actions are to be thought of in a negative light. In many ways, Henry's Association is an exemplification of mankind's drive to create. This issue - is Henry hiding or creating? - forms the most compelling theme of The Universal Baseball Association, as well of providing much of Henry's internal conflict.

But Coover isn't content to deliver a novel with a simple theme, or ask simple questions - and therein lays both the novel's greatness and its folly. We encounter lengthy stream-of-consciousness passages, during which Henry's mind loses the ability to distinguish creation from reality. We hear Henry presented as a god, complete with powers over life and death. We are treated to parallels between creation, destruction, war, and the curious relationship between omnipotence and impotence. The entire last chapter sounds like Absurdist Theater. As we near the end, there can be no doubt that Henry is an overt schizophrenic, and yet, like Humbert Humbert, Henry has a way of making sickness seem normal.

In the opulent extravagance of the novel lies a certain genius. The flights of fancy taken by Henry's supple mind suggest meaning on a wide variety of levels. Not all of it succeeds, especially when Coover digresses into the topic of sex. Still, the book succeeds overall, both as narrative and as commentary on the nature of man. By the end, the association becomes Henry's entire system of meaning - his way of exploring good, evil, purpose, and nihilism. Perhaps answering metaphysical questions using dice is absurd, but perhaps not. As Henry reflects, "You roll, Player A gets a hit or he doesn't, gets his man out or he doesn't. Sounds simple. But call Player A 'Sycamore Flynn' or 'Melbourne Trench' and something starts to happen. He shrinks or grows, stretches out or puts on muscle.... Strange. But name a man and you make him what he is."

I don't recommend this book for the faint of heart. While you can summarize the basic story of "The Universal Baseball Association" in a few words, the actual reading experience is far more intense than a summary would suggest. This book celebrates the myth of baseball as American creation in just about the darkest way imaginable.

The novel's set-up is an appealing one. J. Henry Waugh (whose initials read YAHWEH) took eight of the original post-Civil War major league franchises, populated them entirely with players of his own invention, and evolved his league through dozens of seasons via a tabletop, dice-activated baseball game of his own design. The league begins to consume his life in its 56th season -- and his 56th year. It sounds fun to take on a project like this. Indeed, on the Internet you can even find recreations of the UBA charts as J. Henry Waugh may have designed them.

As the book goes on, however, progressively fewer paragraphs are devoted to the point of view of our protagonist. Rather, Henry's players -- unaware of his very existence -- begin to do all the talking for him. The slide begins innocently enough: Henry leaves work a few minutes early one Wednesday afternoon so he can reread the boxscore of a perfect game one of "his" rookies pitched the night before. While reading, he imagines the past greats of his league telling stories about the early years. In one of the book's funnier moments, one of those old-time players is suddenly cut off in mid-quote when Henry realizes that the man in question is, in fact, dead.

Thus we learn more about Henry's league: His players live full lives after retirement from the playing field, and can even marry, have children, and die. The league structure involves politics, intrigue, romance, music -- sometimes all at once. One of the book's more gruesome in-jokes is retold in a ballad that Henry wrote to celebrate the exploits of one "Long Lew Lydell".

As the book progresses, Coover writes verbose yet carefully structured passages in which Henry vanishes entirely, replaced by the players taking increasing free reign over his subconscious. What the players say in Henry's head is a subtle distortion of what Henry's just been through. Henry's take on women is colored, for example, by the fact that his girlfriend charges by the hour; his players have dreams which mirror his own anxieties. It gets so that Henry can't even complete a conversation with the few acquaintainces in his life, without the players' voices intruding. This becomes progressively more disturbing, especially if you note what happens during Henry's final appearance in the book.

You can't blame Henry for leaving behind such a dreary accounting job; he is escaping into a richer world than did Bartleby, for example. In fact, you could put the book down after Chapter 7 and read it as a happy ending. In 2005, I'd almost venture to say that "Office Space"-type fantasies retroactively make Henry one of the first heroes of the so-called information age. One of the key questions at the end: are we meant to feel sympathy for Henry at the end? Empathy? Pity? Disgust?

What gives "Universal Baseball Association" its life is not the baseball scenes or the office scenes, but rather the depth and texture of Henry's increasingly complicated fantasy sequences. You can see the entropy in Henry's universe by comparing the player names in the final chapter to those in the first two chapters, before things started to go wrong. While difficult to get through -- this is certainly not a beach book, although that's where I read most of it -- "Universal Baseball Association" rewards repeated readings once you overcome the queasy feelings caused by entering Henry's subconscious.

You will also vow never to play Strat-O-Matic Baseball again.

This book is an elaborate intellectual game.Coover brilliantly tells the story of another kind of creator, his main character, Henry Waugh who makes up his own major- leagues and creates the games through which they go through the season. It seems that the whole exercise has a large number of possible interpretations.
And in fact the work comes to read for me as largely an exercise more devoted to what literary critics will say, than what readers will feel.

This is a savagely funny, brutally creative (and, at times, very dark) novel about baseball and the human condition that ultimately takes a theological twist. It is not for everyone, but would definitely be a treat to someone who has a fondness for black comedy and untrustworthy narrators - and some passion for baseball.

The basic story of Coover's book is quite simple. Henry Waugh creates an intricate single-player baseball game that's played with dice. He plays entire seasons with his eight-team league; he keeps detailed statistics for every player and every game; he creates backstories and personalities for his players; he develops an administrative body for his league and imagines political debates among the players; and he acts as an official historian of the league, writing volumes of stories about the game and its players. When something shocking and unexpected occurs within the game, Henry gradually loses the ability to distinguish between reality and imagined events within the game. In the end, he is more or less consumed by his game.

As the synopsis above no doubt suggests, this story begs to be read as an allegory. One might read it as an allegory of God's relation to His creation. Henry, like God, is a creator who appears to have complete control over his creation, and yet, like God, his creation comes to take on a life of its own. When terrible things occur, he desperately wants to step in and set things right, but he also wants the game to retain its integrity. So Henry is like God in that he remains outside his creation even though it seems he could sometimes intervene to set things right. (Indeed, some of the game's players are said to have some sense of a higher power controlling their destiny.) One might also read Henry's relation to his game as an allegory of man's attempt to make sense of his world through art, religion, science, philosophy, etc. All that's really going on is the random event of rolling the dice, as, in some sense, all that's really going on in the universe is certain random physical events. And yet Henry imagines an entire alternate reality to make sense of the random events of his game. His player backgrounds and psychologies, his historical interpretations of the game, his imaginings of crowds and stadiums--all of this is intended to give the random throws of the dice some meaning, some significance to him. (This reading is also suggested by our one look at Henry at work in his job as an accountant. Rather than merely crunch the numbers, he reads a story of the operation of a business off his accounting books. He makes sense of the numbers by seeing them as evidence of something beyond themselves.) Finally, one might interpret Henry's relation to his game as an allegory of the artist's relation to his works.

These allegorical readings notwithstanding, it's also possible to read this book as a simple and moving story of one isolated man who gradually loses touch with reality. While Henry seems a decent enough chap, he has no family, only one friend (and not an especially close one), no real love interest, and no interests outside of his game. From what we learn in the novel, it seems his entire life consists in (occasionally) going to work at his mind-numbing job, stopping at the local bar to drown his sorrows, and sitting at his kitchen table playing his game. Since Henry's life is thoroughly dull and uneventful from the outside, the book focuses on what's going on in his mind. The focus of the book is his isolation and his attempts to create something important and lasting and to be a part of something larger than himself. The opportunity to create something important is what the game appears to provide him, and so it's not all that surprising that he ends up losing himself in his game.

This, of course, suggests that Henry can be understood as an example of the way in which alienated individuals can get lost in solitary pursuits that are made available to them by modern life. Because he lacks an community of people with which to identify, Henry ends up getting lost in his game in much the same way that others can get lost in books, television, the internet, etc. All of these things appear to provide their user with a connection to a world beyond himself, and yet total immersion in them brings you no closer to other people than you'd be without them.

I'd give this book 4.5 stars if I could; that seems a more accurate assessment. The reader should note that this isn't really a baseball book. It's more about the trappings of baseball--the statistics, the history, the players, the rites--than it is about the game itself. So this isn't a book for someone looking for a presentation of dramatic athletic feats; instead, it's a book for the baseball fan whose appreciation of the game is intellectual rather than visceral.