Pricksongs & Descants

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 & Descants Robert 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