Here is an interview I did with Robert Coover in 1996 shortly after the publication of his novel John’s Wife. We were talking over the phone; the interview starts slowly as we feel each other out. But as it gathers steam Coover says marvelous things about his forerunners, Ovid, Kafka, Rabelais and Cervantes. He talks about how, when he planned the novel, he actually started with a paragraph count and the idea of a Bell curve. He also does a lovely reading of a passage — as he says, his first “telephone reading.”
This is from a raw tape that has been in a cardboard box for years; so my usual apologies for the sound quality.
Click the little triangular button to listen to the interview.
Coover Part 1
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Coover Part 2
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—Douglas Glover
See also interviews with Gordon Lish, John Hawkes & William Gass.
The Enemies of the Novel: DG Interview With John Hawkes
Causing Damage — Captain Fiction Redivivus: DG Interview With Gordon Lish
Limericks, Degraded Modernism and The Tunnel: DG Interview with William H. Gass