About The Book

Pinocchio in Venice is a carnivalesque reemersion in the well-known fairy tale – as well as magic realism, Mann’s Death in Venice, and Nabokov’s Lolita – with the puppet, now an aged Nobel Prize winner and aesthete, returning to Venice to pay his final tribute. As he turns back to wood, Robert Coover’s hero is reunited with his old friends and foes while he painfully searches for the Blue-Haired Fairy who put flesh on his limbs.

Written in Coover’s signature style, this is both a brilliant meditation on what it means to be human and a hilarious and bawdy adventure. Pinocchio in Venice represents Coover at his finest.

Praise

“A literate, witty tour de force – a sensory picnic for lovers of language. . . . A startling, thought-provoking philosophy coupled with many levels of humor.” –The San Diego Union

“Mr. Coover’s work has long occupied a place of honor. . . . He goes at his task with an almost alarming linguistic energy, a Burgessy splatter of vocabulary, and a ferocious love of everything comic and grotesque. This is a spectacularly scatological work. . . . Often erotic and frequently hilarious.” –Salman Rushdie

“Pinocchio in Venice is as meaty a blast of sustained intellectual skepticism as one could wish for.” –The Washington Post

“Robert Coover is one of our masters now. The tumultuous, Babylonian exuberance of his mind is fueled and directed by his equally passionate craftsmanship. He seems to be able to do anything.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Coover has written a devastating new version not only of the famous Collodi story, but even more of the usually rehashed representations of Venice. Very few authors of this century . . . have managed to write such a brilliant and prophetic version of the destiny of tourist-infested Venice.” –Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, University of Venice