Rob Couteau

Rob Couteau (born 1956) is a writer and visual artist from Brooklyn. He is the author of the novel Doctor Pluss, the literary anthology Collected Couteau (both recipients of positive reviews in Barney Rosset's Evergreen Review), the epistolary memoir Letters from Paris, the poetry collection The Sleeping Mermaid (with an introduction by author Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno), and the travel memoir The Paris Journals. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, a competition open to writers throughout North America and sponsored by the American Humanist Association. After living as an American expat in Paris for twelve years (1988-2000), he now resides in New Paltz, NY. He is currently working on a collection of interviews of other authors, including Ray Bradbury, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, Hubert Selby Jr., Dr. Albert Hofmann, Michael Korda, Jeffrey H. Jackson, Robert Roper, and Justin Kaplan.
Couteau's work as a literary critic, interviewer, and social commentator has been quoted in books and scholarly articles such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera: A Reader's Guide by Thomas Fahy, David Cohen's Forgotten Millions , Brett Bowden's "Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism," and Leslie Trueman's "The Mandala Experience: Visions of the Center in Schizophrenic and Fictional Accounts of Disintegration."
Critical reception
In his Introduction to The Sleeping Mermaid, literary biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno writes of how " poetic excursions take us to many places: to the Paris of Rimbaud and Picasso, to the Native North Americans, to mythology and history and how the woman he is encountering is seducing him as he seduces her (and us), and finally, how alone, the cosmos plays itself out at 3 a.m. when the only lap dog is memory." And author Jim Feast, in his Evergreen Review essay on Doctor Pluss and Collected Couteau, remarks upon his "Intellectual freshness, richness, and potency," adding: "An impressively creative writer, whom Barney Rosset urged me to review." (Rosset, the former owner of Grove Press and the first American publisher of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet, led the legal battle to publish D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Miller's Tropic of Cancer.) Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno regards Doctor Pluss as an example of "amazingly beautiful, haunting prose," and said he considers it "a great book."<ref>Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, author of The Continual Pilgrordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100214/NEWS/2140323 "Best Bets for Sunday"]. Review of Couteau's "A Year with Picasso," Times Herald Record, 14 February 2010.
* Review of Doctor Pluss and Collected Couteau, Evergreen Review, by Jim Feast, December 2009.
* Rob Couteau at the Van Buren Gallery.

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