Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
“The lonesome abstract cadences suggest Samuel Beckett. . . . As a gunsmokin” wordslinger, Coover rides high in the saddle.” –The Boston Globe
A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out, attaining what The New York Times has called “a blunt, profanity-laced existentialism that seems actually to improve on Sartre.” The lonesome stranger reaches the town”or rather, it reaches him”and he becomes part of its archetypal struggles: gunfights, saloon brawls, bawdy houses, train robberies, and of course the choice between the saloon chanteuse and the sweet-faced schoolmistress whom he loves. Throughout, Robert Coover reanimates the Western epics of Zane Grey and Louis L”Amour, infusing them with the Beckettian echoes, unique comic energy, and exuberant prose that have made him one of the most influential figures in contemporary American literature. It is, as The Washington Post Book World put it, “a fast-forward, ribald vision of the American West, a free-for-all that slides from surreal to ridiculous like a circus-goer’s grin through a fun-house mirror . . . a heady frisson, a salon entertainment, one helluva ride.”
“Exuberant, word-rich . . . a book of constant stylistic inventiveness.” –Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
“The lonesome abstract cadences suggest Samuel Beckett. . . . As a gunsmokin” wordslinger, Coover rides high in the saddle.” –The Boston Globe
“Both warped and scintillating, a cross between No Exit and The Canterbury Tales.” –The New Yorker
“A wickedly funny and ribald satire of cowboy legends . . . [does] to cowboys what Philip Roth did to baseball legends in The Great American Novel.” –USA Today
“For nearly a quarter of a century, [Coover’s] been “filling in” all kinds of genres. . . . With Ghost Town, Coover has now metafictionized the Western. . . . Ghost Town might be billed as the first phantasmagorical Western. . . . Coover has filled in this genre very well.” –Allen Barra, Metro Active Books (read the full review at Metro Active)
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
