This is Robert Coover’s first novel; it came out in 1966. The copy I read was pulled from the library stacks and is a first edition, with a nondescript front cover in brown, with the picture of the white bird you can see in other covers from other editions. This novel begins in a kind of present tense, seeing the quote from my title above, at what becomes a human sacrifice for a religious cult in an unnamed state, but is seemingly the coal mining […]