Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid
Robert Coover is the author of some twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches ‘Cave Writing’ (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed-media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme. Coover currently splits his time between the United States of America and London. Pricksongs & Descants, Gerald’s Party and Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid are all published in Penguin Modern Classics.
John Banville’s novels include The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable and, his latest, The Infinities. He won the Man Booker Prize 2005 for The Sea. He has written screenplays, has adapted three of Heinrich von Kleist’s dramas into English, and reviews for, among others, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian and the Irish Times. He lives in Dublin. Awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tate Black Memorial Prize. He has also received a Lannan Foundation fellowship.