Robert Coover's stories are mind games with a heart. In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters humanizes language games and literary theorizing, and, remarkably, does so by using cartoonish characters and a nearly anonymous narrative voice. While these nine very short pieces don't amount to much in themselves, they are miniature demonstrations of the control Coover displays in his more substantial work. Like a literary juggler, he keeps all the parts of his fiction in motion, balancing rhythm, word play, and the central image of the author creating his story. Or does the story create the author?

"Beginnings," written in 1972, masterfully explores this question. "In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself," reads the first line. What he starts is the story we're reading…. This circular undercutting of cause and effect is the most facile part of "Beginnings." Reaching...