A Child Again Coover Download Free
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I suppose we'd all like to think that our favorite childhood characters stay forever within the pages of their books, waiting patiently for us to rediscover them. They don't grow up, they don't grow old, they don't cheat, or kill, or become hopelessly addicted to booze and pills.
Robert Coover says differently - the lives of our literary pals go on. They've entertained us once already, and now they've got their own shit to attend t
. . . Death is the inevitable punchline for the joke called life.I suppose we'd all like to think that our favorite childhood characters stay forever within the pages of their books, waiting patiently for us to rediscover them. They don't grow up, they don't grow old, they don't cheat, or kill, or become hopelessly addicted to booze and pills.
Robert Coover says differently - the lives of our literary pals go on. They've entertained us once already, and now they've got their own shit to attend to. Deal with it.
These stories are both sad and funny. I didn't love all of them, though most were at least interesting. I was particularly enchanted by The Last One, Coover's twist on Perrault's Bluebeard.
If you're looking for well written, unusual pokes at classic fairy tales, by all means, have at these tales. If you want to keep your sweet, sweet memories intact, avoid them like plague infested rats.
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Coover is 75. (er, today he's 82).
ToC=wise, we've got ::
Sir John Paper and Puff the Dragon get old. What's that like?
Punch -- Murder and Mayhem. You can count on Judy pop'ing in too.
The Invisible Man is a love story. Yes, another love story. But with a twist. They are both invisible.
The Dead Queen -- Seriously, you know that if fairy tales
It won't be on every every page but you'll find something in A Child Again, I mean you'll find somewhere that Coover's tickling your funny=bone. It'll happen.Coover is 75. (er, today he's 82).
ToC=wise, we've got ::
Sir John Paper and Puff the Dragon get old. What's that like?
Punch -- Murder and Mayhem. You can count on Judy pop'ing in too.
The Invisible Man is a love story. Yes, another love story. But with a twist. They are both invisible.
The Dead Queen -- Seriously, you know that if fairy tales were ever for=realsies, they'd all end something like this.
Playing House would be grand metaphysical fun were it palm=sweatingly fantastic fiction, but it falls flat. Why?
Puzzle Page: Riddle :: The first of a trinity of pranks on the page, a pizzle;puzzle. You are asked to puzzle the order of The Five lined up to be fired at in that one famous line of execution.
The Fisherman and the Jinn :: What reallyreally happens when a Magic Lamp shows up on the shore, tickling your toes.
Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock -- 134 years later it is revealed what exactly the Jabberwock is. It remains only to ask whether a male author can adequately pen the experience of being visited by the Jabberwock.
The Fallguy's Faith ;; This is not your average Fall Guy.
The Return of the Dark Children :: Look, Bob, that Piper=guy took care of our problem. It's really not necessary for you to come knockin' around telling us it's not really a solution only a temporary solution and you don't need to tell us it'll come back to bite us in the ass. We've only heard that one a million times! And besides, this was children we were relieved of, not that silly global warming thing.
The Presidents :: You've met The Cat in the Hat. Now meet The Presidents!!
Puzzle=Page: Chicago Cryptogram. Who knows? Something about pre-Socratic philosophers in Chicago?
McDuff on the Mound. Good gods!! Do we really have to do the baseball bit every time we flap open the Coover=covers? Other hand/sides, there is always that certain narrative tension which can only be developed against the backfield of an athletics sort of outfield. I mean, will McDuff finally strike out that Casey guy? No S P O I L E R S !!!!
Grandmother's Nose -- really a classic instance of the classic Coover informing us about the real economy which flows underneath all our fairy=booted tales. This one about a certain girl and a certain hood. Who needs Lacan for this?
Puzzle Page: Suburban Jigsaw -- Love triangles have only three sides. This one's got 16 (sixteen) pieces. Puzzle pieces. On page 194 it's spelled out ;; your task is to id which character from the story maps onto which puzzle=piece and subsequently to spell out the acrostic resulting from their names. Kind of thing. Meanwhile, lots of sex being had in this town.
Stick Man. Coover lays to rest the literary superstition that fictional characters must have three dimensions in order to move the reader to tears. This one's got only two D and you'll sob till you can't sob no=more.
The Last One. You'll see the end coming from a mile off, so I won't even bother teasing you about spoiler tags. Lovely, though.
Aesop's Forest. Really quite a masterful piece. What happens to Aesop? And when his lion gets old, can he still get it up? And the falling turtle is much more compelling than that one famous falling whale. Turtles are funnier.
Heart Suit. One story. 13 tarts. Stolen. The King's tarts. (You decide what the 'tarts' "sym=bull=ize"!) He's raging mad and will uncover the culprit. The story has a classic structure ;;, beginning, middle, end. Beginning and end are determined by a deistic author ; the middle consists of thirteen cards, read these in what order you will. Was first published in a fancy McSweeney's issue :: see that one HERE.
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I adore his "run-on" sentences, rife with commas, ellipses, and parentheses, which make perfect sense to me, and roll along so deliciously; I get happily lost in his writing.
I want to write like him when (if) I grow up. (Well, may
So far, I've read only some of Robert Coover's short stories and novellas: Stepmother, Noir, Spanking the Maid, Briar Rose, and A Night at the Movies: You Must Remember This: Stories. Next on my list is Pricksongs and Descants, and then I'll try digging into his novels.I adore his "run-on" sentences, rife with commas, ellipses, and parentheses, which make perfect sense to me, and roll along so deliciously; I get happily lost in his writing.
I want to write like him when (if) I grow up. (Well, maybe without all the sexual asides; but still).
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While he infuses the stories with humor, Coover also uses the familiar icons of our cultural narrative to access serious themes. “Playing House,†a parable, questions the difference between light and darkness, and human response to both. “The Return of the Dark Children†visits post-Piper Hamelin to explore the roots of hysteria.
Coover electrifies his stories with his characteristic sarcasm and witty wordplay. Vocabulary ranging in topic from elocution to royal court titles to architecture should satisfy any logophile. Each tale flows into the next via common theme or tone, creating a compelling narrative thread through different settings and voices. These stories transform formerly two-dimensional, moralistic caricatures into complex beings enhanced with sexuality, anxiety, memory, fears and hopes. Coover affords us the chance to reevaluate our culture by seeing its foundations anew, giving us the freedom to question it from the same fresh perspective we did as children.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the journey this book takes the re
The world of children's fables and fairy tales becomes fertile soil for nurturing Coover's imagination in this collection of short stories, which like the tales the derive from, examine many complicated aspects of the human condition in veiled and playful ways. Coover's prose, always worthy of praise, is in fine form here. He has a way of transforming the innocent into the perverse with a few beautifully worded and carefully placed phrases.I thoroughly enjoyed the journey this book takes the reader on. From the opening page where we are introduced to Puff the Dragon, brooding in his cave and longing for the long lost boy who used to come to play with him, I knew this was going to be my kind of book. Many of the stories, including Puff's tale and the story of Alice going through menopause in the absurd landscape of Wonderland, deal with the conflicts that arise from growing up and feeling disconnected with the child you used to be. Not an easy theme to craft, but Coover does masterfully.
Other stories take a children's tale as way of discussing the horrible undercurrent that lies just under the surface of our society. As it has often been pointed out, a human community is a fragile eco-system and it would only take one interruption of routine to send it spiraling out of control. This idea is demonstrated with heartbreaking cruelty in the "The Return of the Dark Children" which details what happens to the town the Pied Piper left childless so many years before. The selfish nature of people, and their willingness to exploit others' ignorance, is incredibly captured in this story. In a similar vein, "Stick Man" examines how quickly human wonder can turn to boredom, which often turns to cruelty.
Though the themes are often weighty, the delight of Coover's work is his ability to inject humor into even the most awful circumstances. For example "The Last One", a retelling of one of the darkest fairy tales and also my favorite fairy tale, is one of the book's most playful while still staying true to the horrific nature of the original.
As with any story collection, there are stories that rise to the top and others that simply exist. There weren't any stories in here that I didn't like, though I did wish for more from the Little Red Riding Hood tale, which seems ripe for Coover but here felt somewhat restrained. All in all, this book is a true delight, and not mention one of the finest printed editions that I've seen for a book in quite some time.
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He's diving into childhood stories (for the most part) -- fairy tales and such. The Pied Piper, Snow White, Alice, Little Red Riding Hood, but also adult riffs on the logic puzzles I remember so fondly from fourth grade and t
I don't know that I was quite in the mood for Coover just now, although I appreciated his gifts as much as ever. Or perhaps it's that this collection is Coover in his 70s and that's a different Coover from the one in his 30s/40s that I so adore from Pricksongs and Descants.He's diving into childhood stories (for the most part) -- fairy tales and such. The Pied Piper, Snow White, Alice, Little Red Riding Hood, but also adult riffs on the logic puzzles I remember so fondly from fourth grade and twists on the Invisible Man and the hagiographic love students are meant to have for Presidents. For my money, nearly all of these stories ran on a touch too long and what shocked in early Coover is now a bit predictable. Still, there's much to be found here for the fans and the newcomers alike.
Oh and "Heart Suit" -- attached to the back as a set of shuffle-able cards -- is a delightful (if, yes, a bit too long) Oulipo experiment. Nice to see, at the very least, that the tricky gleam has never once left his eye.
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I loved the First story, about Puff The Magic Dragon, which used the wrds of a well known song to craft a world of wonder that I had spent much of my own imagination wondering about.
The same with The Invisible man; who hasn't imagined what it woulld really be like to be invisible.
I love Coover's style and imagination.
I keep ths book at hand to give my i agination an out when reality gets too real. Each story a different magic carpet for my mind. ...more
the book comes with a deck of cards that can be read in any order. i didn't try that, but perhaps i should sometime.
it's a mc sweeney's book, so that means i bought if for the cover. again.
a different view of childrens' fairytales. I know we've seen this before, but it's always fun read a new take on them.the book comes with a deck of cards that can be read in any order. i didn't try that, but perhaps i should sometime.
it's a mc sweeney's book, so that means i bought if for the cover. again.
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I need to check it out again, because I didn't finish it before we left town (due while we're away, almost done with it, too).
Particularly liked the Invisible Man short story. A few others, but that one - maybe because we've been reading the graphic novel version of the actual story with Dex (Illustrated classics).I need to check it out again, because I didn't finish it before we left town (due while we're away, almost done with it, too).
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In 1966, after the couple returned to the United States, Coover took a teaching position at Bard College in New York. He also published his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), which won the William Faulkner Award for best first novel. In 1969, Coover won a Rockefeller Foundation grant and published Pricksongs and Descants, his first collection of short fiction. That year, he also wrote, produced, and directed a movie, On a Confrontation in Iowa City (1969). Coover has maintained an interest in film throughout his career. During the early 1970s, Coover published only short stories and drama, including A Theological Position (1972), a collection of one-act plays, all of which were eventually produced for the stage. He also won Guggenheim fellowships in 1971 and 1974, and served as fiction editor for the Iowa Review from 1974 to 1977. By the mid-1970s, Coover had finished his next novel, The Public Burning; it took him more than two years to find a publisher for the work, which was ultimately cited as a National Book Award nominee. Coover received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1985 and a Rea Award for A Night at the Movies (1987), a collection of short stories. While Coover concentrated primarily on short fiction—with the exception of Gerald's Party—during the 1980s, he produced a series of new novels during the 1990s.
Coover has taught at a number of universities, including the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Brandeis University, throughout his career. Since 1981 he has been a writer-in-residence and faculty member of the creative writing program at Brown University.
Among the vanguard of American postmodern writers to come of age during the late 1960s, Coover is respected as a vital experimentalist whose challenging work continues to offer insight into the nature of literary creation, narrative forms, and cultural myths. Convinced early in his career that traditional fictional modes were exhausted, Coover has pioneered a variety of inventive narrative techniques, notably complex metafictional structures and ludic pastiches of various genres to satirize contemporary American society and the role of the author. In this wa
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