I want to be adored. I can say this today because astrologer Rob Brezsny says I can, well, with this proviso: “that [I] also express [my] artful adoration for some worthy creature.” No, I don’t believe in astrology, but Brezsny’s advice still seems like a worthy undertaking; so, here goes: Dear Robert Coover, I have just finished reading Pricksongs and Descants (a first edition marked down from the penciled-in $45 to the stickered $7.50), and while I could gush about the sentential musicality; the formal ingenuity: the inventive modular structures, the ingenious use of ellipses, and the re-imaginings of fairy tales and legends; the virtuosic command of rhetorical devices; and the various transgressive moments, like the many genre- and other border-crossings, evinced in every one of the fictions contained in this collection; while I could relish explicating each one of those elements, it is, instead, how all of these elements cohere that most impresses, for that fusion results not in confusion but in a distinctive thing; a thing among things, yes, but a thing unlike the many, many other disposable and often forgettable things; this thing giving lie to the idea proffered in “Klee Dead,” one of your “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” that life is “but a caravan of lifelike forgeries,” for surely this thing I just finished reading is part of life and is anything but a lifelike forgery, this collection still reminding me of the many lifelike forgeries around me.