Robert Coover a study of the short fiction

"In company with John Barth and Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover is among the best-known and acclaimed experimental writers to emerge from the 1960s. While Truman Capote and Norman Mailer embraced realism, borrowing techniques from journalism and fiction writing to create In Cold Blood and Armies of the Night, Coover and his ilk took the opposite path, invoking the surreal and the fantastic to convey the complex nature of human experience. Wedding the vulgar and the sublime, favoring process over content, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and Coover's Pricksongs & Descants for a time derailed American fiction from its traditional course of linearity and social realism."@en
"In company with John Barth and Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover is among the best-known and acclaimed experimental writers to emerge from the 1960s. While Truman Capote and Norman Mailer embraced realism, borrowing techniques from journalism and fiction writing to create In Cold Blood and Armies of the Night, Coover and his ilk took the opposite path, invoking the surreal and the fantastic to convey the complex nature of human experience. Wedding the vulgar and the sublime, favoring process over content, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and Coover's Pricksongs & Descants for a time derailed American fiction from its traditional course of linearity and social realism."