Going for a Beer

Selected Short Fictions

Robert Coover

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780393608472
• Subtopic: Literature General

"A mixtape of variations and a fugue on time from a postmodern master.… Familiar tales and conventional genres are made new, tinged with shuddering wonder and titillating humor." —Yu-Yun Hsieh, The New York Times Book Review

Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as "a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America." Here, in this selection of his best stories, you will find an invisible man tragically obsessed by an invisible woman; a cartoon man in a cartoon car who runs over a real man who is arrested by a real policeman with cartoon eyes; a stick man who reinvents the universe. While invading the dreams and nightmares of others, Coover cuts to the core of how realism works.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction by T.C. Boyle
• The Brother (1962)
• The Elevator (1966)
• The Wayfarer (1968)
• The Hat Act (1968)
• The Gingerbread House (1969)
• The Magic Poker (1969)
• The Babysitter (1969)
• Beginnings (1972)
• The Dead Queen (1973)
• The Fallguy’s Faith (1976)
• In Bed One Night (1980)
• The Tinkerer (1981)
• You Must Remember This (1985)
• Aesop’s Forest (1986)
• Cartoon (1987)
• Top Hat (1987)
• Inside the Frame (1987)
• The Phantom of the Movie Palace (1987)
• Lap Dissolves (1987)
• The Early Life of the Artist (1991)
• The New Thing (1994)
• Punch (2000)
• The Invisible Man (2002)
• The Return of the Dark Children (2002)
• Riddle (2005)
• Grandmother’s Nose (2005)
• Stick Man (2005)
• Going for a Beer (2011)
• The Goldilocks Variations (2013)
• Invasion of the Martians (2016)
• Acknowledgments
• Also by Robert Coover
• Copyright