Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“[Robert Coover is] a marvelous magician . . . a maker of miracles, a comic, a sexual tease. . . . The fictions in Robert Coover’s remarkable volume are solitaires–sparkling, many-faceted, sharply drawn and brightly painted.” –William H. Gass, The New York Times Book Review
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. Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover’s remarkable oeuvre and a brilliant work by a major American writer.
“Pricksongs & Descants . . . revealed Coover to be our most venturesome metafictional fabulist.” –Sven Birkets, The New York Times Book Review
“Using techniques varying from folk fantasy to Stern-like intrusions into realistic narratives, alternating chronologies and points of view with Faulknerian suddenness, Coover achieves highest excellence in a scintillant variety of short fictional forms.” –Frank Cunningham, Saturday Review
“[Robert Coover is] a marvelous magician . . . a maker of miracles, a comic, a sexual tease. . . . The fictions in Robert Coover’s remarkable volume are solitaires–sparkling, many-faceted, sharply drawn and brightly painted.” –William H. Gass, The New York Times Book Review
“He is a wonderful writer, and his is a miraculous imagination that synthesizes warring objects and qualities, and makes strange things seem familiar.” –Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek
“Although this collection was originally published in the sixties, its playful and subersive tone makes it as ‘modern” as the newcomer to the text allows. . . . Pricksongs and Descants is a work that points the way for experimental writin
g. It not only challenges ideas about fiction and authorship, but also about reading itself.” –Sean Merrigan, Spoiledink.com (read the full review at Spoiledink.com)
Mercantile Library Center for Fiction’s 2006 Clifton Fadiman Medal
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
