The Magic Poker Robert Coover Summary

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by Robert Coover

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With a new Introduction by Kate Atkinson 'Robert Coover is one of America's finest stylists, a master of elegant nuance, subtle intent and darkly subversive humour' John Banville In his carnivalesque and riotously inventive Pricksongs & DescantsRobert Coover remakes old stories- of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty (who married her Beast and spends a lifetime suffering his doggy stink). And he reshapes his own- a man makes repeating, re-imagined journeys in an office elevator (while his fellow riders taunt and tempt him), and in the seminal, fractal 'The Babysitter' every moment in a single night is played and replayed, every hope and threat of sex and violence done and undone. Coover's dark, wilfil, comic imagination revels brilliantly in contradictions, a master of chaos. 'Mr Coover's work has long occupied a place of honour . . . 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' Salmon Rushdie… (more)
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Quite an unusual collection of stories, to say the least. Some need multiple re-readings, or at least time to assimilate, like The Panel, and some are grotesque, like The Marker. However, some are more accessible, and even playful. The structure of some allow for multiple scenarios, like the famous ' The Babysitter. Other favorites were The Pedestrian Accident, The Hat Act, The Brother and The Elevator. I read somewhere that the title of the collection comes from early music, where plucked notes lie below an upper melody or descant. That makes sense for the stories that are take offs on fairy tales, like The Doors and The Gingerbread House. ( )
steller0707 Aug 25, 2019
He pronounces it aloud, smiles faintly, sadly, somewhat wearily, then continues his tedious climb, pausing from time to time to stare back down the stairs behind him.
When the time arrives for resolution, I will be there. One day soon the followers of Coover will engage those of Barth tooth and claw. There will be no quarter. The scene will remind us of Bangkok and we will wear the shirt of Coover proudly. Through the tear-gas and vitriol we will triumph. Our cause will prevail because of the brilliance of The Magic Poker and The Babysitter. These two exercises astonish in their smutty Impressionism. It will be admitted that I was sometimes too impatient or ill-equipped to truly delight in all of the pieces presented here.
Where Barth paints with manic glee about Story, Coover recycles his own variations, distilling a Gestalt where the dross whispers of all outcomes and the reader's imagination trembles in capacity. Hope remains --and victory will be ours. Coover Rules!
( )
jonfaith Feb 22, 2019
Book Description
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. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.
My Review
I'm glad I read this book because it is a unique style of writing but by the end of the book I was getting a little tired of the ambiguity and nonsense. If you like different styles of writing, you may find this book rather interesting. ( )
EadieB Jun 1, 2016
I'm glad I read this book because it is a unique style of writing but by the end of the book I was getting a little tired of the ambiguity and nonsense. If you like different styles of writing, you may find this book rather interesting. ( )
EadieB Jan 19, 2016
The short stories in this collection were so different from each other and from everything else I’ve ever read that it’s hard to know where to begin with this book. Some of them were retellings of well-known stories and fairy tales, although many of those were so obscure that I wasn’t familiar with the original story. There was also a lot of non-linear storytelling with Coover going back and rewriting his own plots so that you were reading several different versions of the same story at once. I liked this technique and the possibilities it raised for a story to go in many different directions, but the book as a whole wasn’t enjoyable for me. I was often lost and felt like I just wasn’t getting it. I also felt like certain plot elements crossed the line from unpleasant and uncomfortable into disgusting and repulsive. Another minor complaint I have to mention is that while I don’t mind it when authors throw in a little bit of foreign language, Coover really tested my patience with the amount of Spanish in the story dedicated to Cervantes. Not being able to understand large chunks of the text gets frustrating after a while. Overall, I never reached the point where I wanted to throw the book across the room, but I’m definitely glad to be finished with it. ( )
AmandaL. Jan 16, 2016
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Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady by Robert Coover

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  1. Robert Coover New Yorker
  2. Robert Coover Short Story
  3. The Babysitter Robert Coover
  4. The Magic Poker Robert Coover Summary Book
  5. Robert Coover The Babysitter
Coover in 2009
BornFebruary 4, 1932 (age 87)
Charles City, Iowa, United States
OccupationWriter
Alma materSouthern Illinois University Carbondale
Indiana University (B.A.)
University of Chicago (M.A.)
Period1960s–present
GenreShort story, novel
SpouseMaría del Pilar Sans Mallafré (1959–present)
Children

Robert Coover New Yorker

Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University.[1] He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.

  • These introductory remarks, Coover makes it clear from the beginning of 'The Magic Poker' that the creator's self-conscious grasp of his very creation falters at various points. The influence of this strategy on the text's configuration and narrative coherence is obvious. The reader's expectations of closure, consistency or progress in the plot are.
  • Sep 05, 2015 In The Magic Poker as well, Coover as to finding a magic poker, depicts five both plausible and contradictory situations. In the first one, the girl in gold pants comes upon a poker, picks it up and kisses it, and encounters a handsome man.
  • Robert Coover was born on February 4 th, 1932 in Charles City, Iowa. It seems he inherited a knack for writing from his father who worked as the managing editor of the Herrin Daily Journal when his family moved to Herrin, Illinois.
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Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. Robert Coover’s central concern is the human being’s need for fiction.Because of the complexity of human existence, people are constantly inventing patterns that give them an illusion of order. Coover employs a series of Brechtian devices to distance the reader from the action. The execution is set for the night of the Rosenbergs' fourteenth wedding anniversary and is to be a public celebration in New York's Times Square, the entertainment to be organized by Cecil B.

  • 4Bibliography

Life and works[edit]

Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa.[2] He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University in 1953,[3] then served in the United States Navy. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968, he signed the 'Writers and Editors War Tax Protest' pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[4] Coover has served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities. He taught at Brown University from 1981 to 2012.[5][6][7]

Coover's wife is the noted needlepoint artist Pilar Sans Coover.[8][9][10]They have three children, including Sara Caldwell.[11]

Coover's first novel was The Origin of the Brunists, in which the sole survivor of a mine disaster starts a religious cult. His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., deals with the role of the creator. The eponymous Waugh, a shy, lonely accountant, creates a baseball game in which rolls of the dice determine every play, and dreams up players to attach those results to.

The Magic Poker Robert Coover Summary

Coover's best-known work, The Public Burning, deals with the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in terms that have been called magic realism. Half of the book is devoted to the mythic hero Uncle Sam of tall tales, dealing with the equally fantastic Phantom, who represents international Communism. The alternate chapters portray the efforts of Richard Nixon to find what is really going on amidst the welter of narratives.

A later novella, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears offers an alternate Nixon, one who is devoted to football and sex with the same doggedness with which he pursued political success in this reality. The theme anthology A Night at the Movies includes the story 'You Must Remember This', a piece about Casablanca that features an explicit description of what Rick and Ilsa did when the camera wasn't on them. Pinocchio in Venice returns to mythical themes.

Coover demonstrating the 'CaveWriting' software

Coover is one of the founders of the Electronic Literature Organization. In 1987 he was the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Awards and honors[edit]

  • 1967 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel for The Origin of the Brunists
  • 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story

Robert Coover Short Story

William Faulkner, Brandeis University, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rea Lifetime Short Story, Rhode Island Governor's Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman Awards, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and DAAD fellowships[12]

See also[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

Novels[edit]

  • The Origin of the Brunists. 1966.
  • The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968)
  • The Public Burning (1977)
  • Gerald's Party (1986)
  • Pinocchio in Venice (1991)
  • John's Wife (1996)
  • Ghost Town (1998)
  • The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut (2002)
  • Noir (2010)
  • The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014)
  • Huck Out West (2017)
  • The Baby Sitter

Short fiction[edit]

Collections

FanDuel will become the authorized gaming operator of Major League Baseball. This is the first time that FanDuel has reached an agreement with Major League Baseball or any individual professional baseball team.Even though this is the first time that has reached an agreement with MLB, this isn’t the first time that Major League Baseball has struck a similar deal. Major league baseball gambling scandals. This deal will now give FanDuel the right to use logos and trademarks, but, more importantly, it will be able to use official league data.Both companies have announced and confirmed this multi-year partnership that will have a huge role in daily fantasy sports and baseball lines for Major League Baseball games.

The Babysitter Robert Coover

  • Pricksongs & Descants (1969) (collection)

The Magic Poker Robert Coover Summary Book

Stories[13]

TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collectedNotes
The crabapple tree2015'The crabapple tree'. The New Yorker. 90 (43): 58–61. January 12, 2015.
  • 'The Babysitter,' inspiration for The Babysitter (1969) (short story)
  • A Political Fable (1968, 1980, 2017) (novella)
    • Originally published as a short story 'The Cat in the Hat for President' in New American Review, 1968; re-released under its original title in 2017.
  • Spanking the Maid (1982) (novella)
  • In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters (1983) (collection)
  • Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears (1987) (novella)
  • A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This (1987) (themed anthology)
  • Dr. Chen's Amazing Adventure (1991) (novella)
  • Briar Rose (1996) (novella)
  • The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) (2002) (novella)
  • Stepmother (2004) (novella)
  • A Child Again (2005) (collection)
  • 'The Case of the Severed Hand'. Harper's Magazine. 317 (1898): 74–80. July 2008.
    • Reprinted in Noir.
  • 'White-bread Jesus'. Harper's Magazine. 317 (1903): 79–88. December 2008.
    • Reprinted in The Brunist Day of Wrath, Chapter I.2
  • 'An Encounter'. Fortnightly Review. October 2010.
  • 'The Old Man'. Fortnightly Review. February 2011.
  • 'Going for a beer'. The New Yorker. March 14, 2011.
  • 'Matinée'. The New Yorker. July 25, 2011.
  • 'The Goldilocks Variations'. The American Reader. Vol. 1 no. 7. August 2013.
  • 'The Colonel's Daughter'. The New Yorker. September 2, 2013.
  • 'The Frog Prince'. The New Yorker. January 27, 2014.
  • 'The Waitress'. The New Yorker. May 19, 2014.
  • 'The Crabapple Tree'. The New Yorker. January 12, 2015.
  • 'The Hanging of the Schoolmarm'. The New Yorker. November 28, 2016.
  • The Cat in the Hat for President. See A Political Fable (April 2017)[14] (novella)
  • Going for a Beer. Selected Short Fictions (February 2018)[15] (collection)
  • 'The Enchanted Prince'. The Evergreen Review (October 2018).

Plays[edit]

  • A Theological Position (1972) (plays)

Non-fiction[edit]

  • 'The End of Books'. The New York Times. June 21, 1992. (essay)

References[edit]

  1. ^'Literary Arts'. Brown University.
  2. ^Evenson, Brian (2003). Understanding Robert Coover. University of South Carolina Press. p. 1. ISBN978-1570034824.
  3. ^Stengel, Wayne B. (2001). 'Robert Coover'. In Fallon, Erin; Feddersen, R.C.; Kurtzleben, James; Lee, Maurice A.; Rochette-Crawley, Susan (eds.). A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English. Routledge. pp. 118–32. ISBN1-57958-353-9.
  4. ^'Writers and Editors War Tax Protest' January 30, 1968, New York Post
  5. ^'Unspeakable Practices V: Celebrating the Life and Work of Robert Coover'. The Providence Phoenix. Archived from the original on 2014-04-07.
  6. ^'Unspeakable Practices V: Festival Bios'. Brown University.
  7. ^'Unspeakable Practices V: Celebrating Robert Coover'. Brown University.
  8. ^Born María del Pilar Sans Mallafré
  9. ^'Pilar Sans Coover'.
  10. ^'Contemporary Midwest Writers Series, Nos. 1,2 Author(s): Franklyn Alexander, Robert Bly, Robert Coover and Camille Blachowicz'. The Great Lakes Review. 3 (1): 66–73. Summer 1976. JSTOR41337445.
  11. ^Current Biography Yearbook 1991, volume 52. H. W. Wilson. 1992. p. 159.
  12. ^https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/faculty/robert-coover/robert-coover
  13. ^Short stories unless otherwise noted.
  14. ^https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cat-hat-president-robert-coover/
  15. ^http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294994511

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Robert Coover.

Robert Coover The Babysitter

  • 'Robert Coover'. Providencephoenix.com. Archived from the original on 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2011-08-19.– Interview
  • Robert Coover on IMDb
  • Rettberg, Scott. 'A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover on Vimeo'. Vimeo.com. Retrieved 2011-08-19.– Novelist Robert Coover's keynote address at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar (elitineurope.net), September 13, 2008. Introduced by Scott Rettberg. Videography by Martin Arvebro.
  • Lydon, Christopher (2008-12-09). 'In the Obama Moment: Robert Coover'. Radio Open Source. Radio Interview
  • Bookworm Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt: December 2005, December 2005
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