The New York Times Book Review - Yu-Yun Hsieh
…a mixtape of variations and a fugue on time from a postmodern master. The prismatic repertoire of nearly six decades, it comprises something old, something new, something borrowed and something dark and blue. The book begins with an alternative flood fable that first appeared in 1962 and ends with an alien invasion tale from 2016. That range, from primal myth to science fiction, is representative. In Coover's fictional universe, familiar tales and conventional genres are made new, tinged with shuddering wonder and titillating humor. Coover is revered as a writer's writer for his mythic vision and experiments with literary form…Yet Coover's starting point has always remained classical, biblical and Continental. He has a background in Slavic studies and draws inspiration from mythology, folklore and fairy tales. He is intimate with Ovid, Cervantes and Rabelais; from Beckett he learned minimalism, from Kafka the absurd. He denounced Christianity at an early age, but his work is rife with apocalyptic visions and paradises lost.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
One has never come to Coover's fiction expecting minor-chord epiphanies or realistic observations about how we live. He delivers instead naughtily reimagined fairy tales and movie scenarios and other testimonies from his own devil-ready twilight zone…His stories are…Grand Guignol entertainments for jaded eyeballs. They're often killingly funny…The best of these stories are now collected in Going for a Beer—a deceptively aw-shucks title for a volume that more accurately would add to those four words "in a town in which all lawns are watered with the blood of virgins, every deck of cards contains 26 jokers, all herrings are red herrings and every citizen carries a pitchfork or a torch." When Coover's stories don't work…they're dreadful…But when they work, oh my.
Booklist
"An excellent opportunity to look back at the development of a true original.... Coover can still work at the top of his game."
The Buffalo News
"This collection is astonishing....[Coover] has managed to be literature’s guardian at the same time he has been its re-inventor and alternative...He is both astounding and fun to read at the same time."
New York Times - Dwight Garner
"Trickster, tinkerer, inventor, parodist....Coover is among the pioneer mutants of American literature, to borrow a phrase Leslie Fiedler bestowed upon William S. Burroughs. You catch his rebel DNA in the work of writers as disparate as George Saunders and Sheila Heti and Donald Antrim."
Providence Journal
"A riveting, elusive, phantasmagoric, weird, delightful, grim and farcical collection....Coover’s imagination is so rich, demonic, outrageously funny and passionate that as you emerge from one story, you can’t wait for the next one to begin....Coover...is one of our best writers, and this collections underscores that judgment with boundless desire and imaginative bliss."
APRIL 2018 - AudioFile
Narrator Charlie Thurston’s mettle and vocal dexterity are tested in this collection of short fiction by the renowned postmodernist Robert Coover. These stories can be maddening (the repetitions in “The Elevator”); intensely sensual (the love scene in “You Must Remember This”); almost hallucinatory (in the multiple points of view in “The Babysitter”). In these, among others, in this collection, the narrator is asked to perform stories that are like gyroscopes, turning in and out on themselves. Thurston’s vocal virtuosity is on display in the charged dialogue of Coover’s imagining of an intense sex scene between Rick and Ilsa of the movie CASABLANCA. Here the narrator convincingly acts out both characters in explicit action. Coover’s stories need a deft reader; Thurston more than meets the challenge. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
