At the end of Huckleberry Finn, on the eve of the Civil War, Huck and Tom Sawyer decide to escape "sivilization" and "light out for the Territory." In Robert Coover's vision of their Western adventures, Tom decides he'd rather own civilization than escape it, leaving Huck "dreadful lonely" in a country of bandits, war parties, and gold. In the course of his ventures, Huck reunites with old friends, facing hard truths and even harder choices.

A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out. The lonesome stranger reaches the town -- or rather, it reaches him -- and he becomes part of its gunfights, saloon brawls, bawdy houses, train robberies, and, of course, the choice between the saloon chanteuse or 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 funhouse mirror ... a heady frisson, a salon entertainment, one helluva ride."

Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on - a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his guests - besides an evening gone mad - is part murder mystery, part British parlor drama, part sly and dazzling meditation of time, theater, and love.

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.

A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning".

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.

Do Midwesterners have a peculiar way of looking at the world? Is there something not quite right about the way they see things? For such a normal place, the heartland has produced some writers who take a most individual approach to storytelling. And the result to the delight of readers everywhere has been stories that reveal the mystery, joy, and enchantment in the most ordinary and incidental moments of life. These 33 exceptional tales showcase the peculiarly wonderful vision of some of the region s best-known or soon-to-be-celebrated writers. Each invites its readers to see the world through different eyes and see it anew."