Critical acclaim for Rob Couteau's novel, Doctor Pluss:

"Amazingly beautiful, haunting prose. It's a great book."
 -- Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno,

author of:
An Invisible Spectator:
A Biography of Paul Bowles
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

and
The Continual Pilgrimage:
American Writers in Paris
(Grove Press / Bloomsbury)

 

"Intellectual freshness, richness and potency ...
An impressively creative writer, whom Barney Rosset urged me to review."
 -- Jim Feast,

author of Neo Phobe (with Ron Kolm; Autonomedia)
from his Evergreen Review essay on
Doctor Pluss and Collected Couteau.


The Paris Journals begins with Couteau's journey to the city of his distant ancestors. There, he lived a dream: to successfully expatriate to France. In this and in the epistolary memoir, Letters from Paris, we have a chronicle that is earthy and Rabelaisian as well as reflective and philosophical. It includes portraits of an often bizarre mentalité française; the expatriate's struggle to master his creative form; and contemplations on art, literature, and culture. Meditations on spirituality and mysticism alternate with erotic cameos rendered in a droll, sophisticated yet vaudevillian manner.

* * *

Excerpts from The Paris Journals:

- An Interview with Shakespeare & Co.'s George Whitman

 

Couteau was born in Brooklyn, NY, and studied fine arts at the State University of New York, at New Paltz. In the mid-1980s he was director of a nonprofit agency that provided advocacy, housing, and counselling for former psychiatric patients, in New York City. In 1985 he won the Fourth Annual North American Essay Award, a competition open to writers throughout North America and sponsored by the American Humanist Association. He has published poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews in such publications as The Alembic; Anima; Arete; Bloomsbury Review; Cadillac Cicatrix; Chrysalis; Colere; Confluent Educational Journal; Croton Review; The European; Footwork; The Garden State; The Hawaii Pacific Review; Heavenbone; The Humanist; The Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy; Lapis; Lift Magazine; New Leaves Review; The Paris Voice; Passager; Quantum; Raintaxi; Rockhurst Review; Spring; Venice Magazine; Versitude; West Hills Review; White Pelican Review; Xanadu; and Z Miscellaneous.

After living in Paris for twelve years, he returned to the U.S. in December 2000. He currently resides in upstate New York.

 

 

 

 

| The Sleeping Mermaid | Collected Couteau | Doctor Pluss | The Paris Journals | Letters from Paris |

Updated: 14 Jan. 2013 | Copyright © 2013 by Rob Couteau All rights reserved.