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In company with John Barth and Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover is among the best-known and acclaimed experimental writers to emerge from the 1960s. While Truman Capote and Norman Mailer embraced realism, borrowing techniques from journalism and fiction writing to create In Cold Blood and Armies of the Night, Coover and his ilk took the opposite path, invoking the surreal and the fantastic to convey the complex nature of human experience. Wedding the vulgar and the sublime, favoring process over content, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and Coover's Pricksongs & Descants for a time derailed American fiction from its traditional course of linearity and social realism Coover's role in this revolt has been viewed largely from the vantage point of his full-scale works. Primarily a novelist, he has received relatively little attention for his short fiction. Some critics may argue that his greatest work is represented in his novels, especially The Public Burning; in Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction, Thomas E. Kennedy suggests that Coover's short fiction represents his most wonderous work. The stories in Pricksongs and Descants, Coover's first collection, are reminiscent of Grimm's fairy tales, Kennedy writes, combining the real and surreal to create "a series of increasingly mythical, symbolic, often terrifying occurrences." Finding fantasy, myth, love story, soap opera, slapstick comedy, parable, daydream, and nightmare, Kennedy offers a comprehensive analysis of the stories in Pricksongs & Descants and the two collections that followed: In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters and A Night at the Movies. Interviews with Coover--one conducted by Kennedy specifically for this volume--feature Coover's ideas on a wide range of topics, including technique, playwriting and screenwriting, neoconservatism, and the writing process. William Gass's historic review of Pricksongs and Descants is reprinted here, along with other critical commentary on A Night at the Movies and In Bed One Night
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