Open House — Robert Coover

One hundred floors above Manhattan, a diverse group of guests and gate-crashers come together in a luxurious penthouse. The down-and-out blend seamlessly with the well-to-do. Scammers find themselves the target of a con so twisted that by the time they begin to figure it out it’s too late to extract themselves. But what’s the occasion? Is it a party? A religious congregation? A real estate listing? Or is there something else going on? For over half a century, Robert Coover has been one of the most inventive and unpredictable writers in the American academy. Long heralded for his commitment to formal as well as technological innovation, with Open House, Coover reminds readers that his work is as steeped in literary history as it is forward-thinking experimentation. This tension—between old and new, between a romanticized past and a future we only pretend we can predict—animates Coover’s latest metafiction, where narrative is at once the point and so beside the point that it calls into question all the myths by which we organize our lives.From Evergreen Review Books, an imprint of OR Books.