Salon with Christopher Boucher presenting BIG GIANT FLOATING HEAD and Robert Coover presenting GOING FOR A BEER

Christopher Boucher presents his newest book, Big Giant Floating Head, with acclaimed author Robert Coover, for his short story collection, Going for a Beer.

Heartfelt and riotously imaginative, Big Giant Floating Head is the daring, dazzling account of a man’s struggle with love, loss and redemption. After his wife announces on Twitter that she’s leaving him, Christopher’s life in small-town Coolidge just goes from one catastrophe to another. He contracts a strange illness that divides him in half, undergoes a failure competition, and is driven to join a cult called The Unloveables. How did it all get this bad? How can he regain his bearings, and find meaning and love once again?

Christopher Boucher is author of the widely praised novels Golden Delicious and How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. He teaches literature and writing at Boston College, and is editor of the literary journal Post Road. He lives in Northampton, MA.

“Boucher makes the world come alive by making language come alive.”–George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

Robert Coover has been playing by his own rules for more than half a century, earning the 1987 Rea Award for the Short Story as “a writer who has managed, willfully and even perversely, to remain his own man while offering his generous vision and versions of America.” Here, in Going for a Beer, a selection of his best stories, you will find an invisible man tragically obsessed by an invisible woman; a cartoon man in a cartoon car who runs over a real man who is arrested by a real policeman with cartoon eyes; a stick man who reinvents the universe. While invading the dreams and nightmares of others, Coover cuts to the core of how realism works.

Robert Coover is the author of Huck Out West, among many other works of fiction. He is a pioneer in the field of electronic writing, and founded the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write program, at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

“These have been, for over 40 years, some of the most remarkable stories written in this country.”–Buffalo News

Porter Square Books’ Salon reading series is a new endeavour aiming to revive the salons of old–events where people would invite artists, writers, musicians, and other intellectuals into their homes and then invite their friends or their community in for an evening of performance, discussion, and conversation. In many places, the salons were the intellectual and cultural centers of their communities. As booksellers, we often have the opportunity to spend time with authors and just a handful of other dinner guests, sparking all manner of interesting discussions, and we wanted to bring this experience to you, our customers! (Interested to host a salon? Reach out to leila@portersquarebooks.com for more information!)