In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters


In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters is a collection of short fiction by Robert Coover. The stories originally appeared in periodicals and were first collected in 1983 by Burning Deck Press, issued in a limited edition.
The pieces in the volume may be classified as prose poems or "metafictional exercises".

Stories

All the stories were first published in periodicals as indicated below.
  • "The Debris"
  • "The Old Man"
  • "In Bed One Night"
  • "Getting to Wichita"
  • "The Tinkerer"
  • "The Fallguy's Faith"
  • "An Encounter"
  • "The Convention"
  • "The Beginnings"

Retrospective appraisal

Journalist and critic Caryn James writes:
Essayist and novelist Thomas E. Kennedy notes that this collection, though the "lightest" and "slightest" of Coover's first three short story collection, contains works of "genius and originality".