Issued by: Laura Hunt
414-229-6447
llhunt@uwm.edu
Date: Feb. 27, 2002
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Issued by: Laura Hunt Date: Feb. 27, 2002 |
MILWAUKEE -- Fiction writer Robert Coover, described in The New York Times Book Review as "a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force," will read from his works on Thursday, March 28, at 7:30 p.m. on the UWM campus.
Coover is among a group of American writers, including John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, and others who transformed the nature of fiction in the '60s and '70s, opening it up to endless possibilities. His collection of short stories, "Pricksongs and Descants," is a classic metafictional text.
His reading will be held in room 175 of Curtin Hall, 3243 N. Downer Ave.
Coover, who teaches at Brown University, has won fellowships from the Lannon, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He received the William Faulkner Award for his first novel, "The Origin of the Brunists," and also received an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award. His works of fiction also include "John's Wife," "Pinocchio in Venice," "The Public Burning," "Spanking the Maid," "Gerald's Party," and "Briar Rose." Among his plays are "A Theological Position" and "The Leper's Helix." In recent years, he has been active in encouraging post-postmodern, cyberpunk, and hypertext authors through a series of literary festivals and conferences.
"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," Salman Rushdie has written about Coover. Coover is the third of four visiting writers to read at UWM this spring semester in a series hosted by the school's Creative Writing Program, and co-sponsored by the English Department and the College of Letters and Science. Poet Charles Bernstein will read Wednesday, April 24.
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