Larry McCaffery interviews Robert Coover at Brown University. Coover talks about the use of art as a commodity. Coover discusses the lack of a writing community in America and how American writers have sprung up doing the same thing at the same time without reading each other’s works. Coover explains that in his own writing he is not particularly interested in language but in how fiction “reflects something else and that something else is always a bit elusive for me.” Coover explains that he is interested in story no matter the form and explains how that relates to his early work (his first two novels and first collection of short stories). The interview then focuses around the delays in the publication of Coover’s novel The Public Burning. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 62 to 78 of Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, University of Illinois Press, 1983.
