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.