Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
Spanking the Maid
by Robert Coover“Not only exceedingly brief but nearly flawless. . . To err is human, to spank divine.” –The New York Times Book Review
Books
Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
About The Book
This spellbinding, impeccable novel tells the story of a master, his maid, and the irresistible ritual that binds them.
Each morning, the maid arrives in the master’s bedroom with her cleaning paraphernalia, hoping to make this day’s round of work the perfect one. Each morning, the master awakes from a half-remembered but recurring dream of knowledge and chastisement”the residue of which the maid, to her horror, finds each morning in his bed. And each day, the master can only notice the maid’s failures and so must, in obedience to his ‘manual,” administer her punishment, assuring her that it is an obligation to an ideal of a higher order that compels him, an obscure compulsion from which neither, seemingly, can escape.
Written early in Robert Coover’s illustrious career, included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and named by Daphne Merkin in The New Yorker as one of her “favorite” S/M books, Spanking the Maid is a spare, tantalizing, perfect book by an American master.
Praise
“Astonishing . . . a sinister comedy about obsessions of every sort.” –The Boston Globe
“Not only exceedingly brief but nearly flawless. . . To err is human, to spank divine.” –The New York Times Book Review
“Though Coover’s message is bleak, his delivery is wonderfully comic . . . . This is a brilliant novella and a riveting read.” –Bharati Mukherjee, The Globe & Mail (Toronto)
