Robert Coover to headline M2C

Robert Coover is a phenomenal literary talent with a cult following in America, but is something of a literary secret in Britain and Ireland.  Yet, of all the postmodernist writers, Robert Coover has been described as “probably the funniest and the most malicious”.  Highly praised by Salman Rushdie and John Banville amongst others, Coover is the author of twenty-some books of fiction and plays. 

He is the author of twenty-some books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches “Cave Writing” (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme.

Coover has stated that “Beckett exerted a powerful influence on me at a critical moment” and that from Beckett he “got the closest sense of art as vocation”.  He tells a marvellous story about being holed up in a cabin near an isolated lake, reading Beckett side by side with the Bible.  He also credits Beckett with the revelation that it was no longer possible to “go back and write another 19th century novel”, that Beckett’s work signified the end of something, a revelation which has informed the rest of his artistic life.

Coover’s essentially optimistic view of the novel’s possibilities will be fascinating to discover, especially at a time when digital platforms seem to be reaching the tipping point.  He suggests that, as it took millennia for cuneiform to deliver Gilgamesh, 150 years for movable type to deliver Don Quixote, and 200 years of American history to deliver the American novel, so it may be a while before we see similar texts in our own newly "conjured" medium.  Watch this space............

Robert Coover is one of America’s finest stylists, a master of elegant nuance, subtle intent and darkly subversive humour. His abiding theme, strongly discernible in these two wonderful novellas, is the gap that lies between our notions of the world and the world’s stubborn and consternating reality, and, further, the way in which that reality keeps on slyly asserting itself through the intricate elaborations of myth and fairy-tale. A self-conscious artist, fully aware of his vocation and ruefully accepting of its demands, he is that rarest of things, a poet in an age of prose … The word ‘classic’ is much abused, but in this instance it is entirely apt.  Coover is a magician, and these are his spells”.

John Banville, from the new introduction to Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid