Title: Spanking the Maid Author: Robert Coover ISBN: 9780802135407 Publisher: Grove Press Published: 1997 Binding: Paperback Language: English Edition: First Edition Number of Pages: 112 Condition Note: New from the publisher Publisher Description: This spellbinding, impeccable novel tells the story of a master, his maid, and the irresistible ritual that binds them. Each morning, the maid arrives in the master's bedroom with her cleaning paraphernalia, hoping to make this day's round of work the perfect one. Each morning, the master awakes from a half-remembered but recurring dream of knowledge and chastisement"the residue of which the maid, to her horror, finds each morning in his bed. And each day, the master can only notice the maid's failures and so must, in obedience to his 'manual," administer her punishment, assuring her that it is an obligation to an ideal of a higher order that compels him, an obscure compulsion from which neither, seemingly, can escape. Written early in Robert Coover's illustrious career, included in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, and named by Daphne Merkin in The New Yorker as one of her "favorite" S/M books, Spanking the Maid is a spare, tantalizing, perfect book by an American master.
