Robert Coover's stories are mind games with a heart. In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters humanizes language games and literary theorizing, and, remarkably, does so by using cartoonish characters and a nearly anonymous narrative voice. While these nine very short pieces don't amount to much in themselves, they are miniature demonstrations of the control Coover displays in his more substantial work. Like a literary juggler, he keeps all the parts of his fiction in motion, balancing rhythm, word play, and the central image of the author creating his story. Or does the story create the author?

"Beginnings," written in 1972, masterfully explores this question. "In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself," reads the first line. What he starts is the story we're reading…. This circular undercutting of cause and effect is the most facile part of "Beginnings." Reaching for substance, Coover brings the author-character to life, making him implausible, mundane, unique, and universal. The island becomes a postlapsarian Eden, complete with Eve (this time she's the one who gives up a rib), children, and the distractions and rewards of family life….

Though the more recent works are slighter, they share some characteristic Coover effects. "here's what happened it was pretty good" is the first line of "An Encounter." "The Old Man" starts, "this one has to do with an old man." Such stories belong to the second generation of metafiction: Coover not only writes about self-conscious storytelling, he assumes that we are aware of his self-referential posture. There's no need to introduce us to the pervasive but protean "he," the author-character at the center of most of his fiction….

"In Bed One Night" is a literary slapstick in which several strangers are assigned to share the same bed—social security cutbacks seem to be the problem. An old lady searches for her dentures, her one-legged brother lies at the foot of the bed, a drunken worker fucks a fat woman, and a skinny Oriental cowers, as the owner of the bed registers his shock: "wha—?! he cries out in alarm." Coover skillfully orchestrates this pandemonium in a breathless, unpunctuated style. Even when his comic technique is so emphatically in the foreground, he keeps an eye on the complexity of authorship. In his most farcical moments or his most deft and restrained moods, Coover is relentlessly energetic about one question. His fiction insists on asking where its own creativity comes from, and just as insistently answers that it exists only in the active process of writing and reading.