Kid Coole tells the story of a young, up-and-coming lightweight boxer out of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. But it is not just a boxing novel; it is one of the best observed novels about a way of life that most of us have never seen, much less thought about. Besides boxing, Kid Coole is a story about social justice and multicultural America. In writing an exquisite boxing novel, Stephens also gives voice to a cast of outsiders and marginalized down-and-out Americans, most of them living in Sticks or Leathe, the tiny upstate towns where their lives unfold. Even if you have never cared for the world of boxing, this is a novel worth reading for its poetry and authentic rhythms of experience of our country’s underbelly, its poor and disenfranchised, its down-and-out and forgotten Americans. Michael Gregory Stephens forces us to see this world and its people, and to listen to these voices and their throw-away lives.
Here is what critics have said about Stephens’ other two Coole family novels
The Brooklyn Book of the Dead
“Michael Stephens was my Dante into dark and dangerous places that native Irish writers never knew. Mr. Stephens, sardonic, witty, places his characters in the path of an oncoming future that seems to offer little hope though you know in the end they’ll prevail.”
Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes
“This beautiful, cruel book--classical in form, Celtic in language, Brooklyn-American in content--is Michael Stephens’s best book and may well be a masterpiece. It’s like a pit bull on a chain, and you can lose a hand if you try to pet it. Read it carefully, warily.”
Russell Banks, author of Affliction and Continental Drift
“...witty, thoughtful, and absorbingly readable, as well as an important study of urban violence.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Angry, funny and tender, rather than grim, Stephens is a poet of the negative, the failed, the shameful, who can match Samuel Beckett for dour comedy and Joyce for the lyric lilt. In five long chapters of increasing power, Stephens dismantles the American dream.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lyric, urgent, stunning—Michael Stephens has written a eulogy to a time and place, East New York, and to a people—the Irish of Brooklyn who will live on in this book of the dead.”
Maureen Howard, author of Natural History
“Lesser novelists faced with this array of characters would be content with merely depicting the decay of familial relationships. Mr. Stephens weaves them into a poem that soars. Out of remarkable bits and pieces—the interior monologues, the vivid scatological imagery, the impressionistic dialogue—there emerges a Coole gestalt that is far more than the sum of its sad ingredients.”
New York Times Sunday Book Review
“It is a joy to read because Michael Stephens is such a superb writer, a master of language, in short, a poet. In his immaculate artistry he has given us another way of perceiving our lives and our struggle, forcing us to ask ourselves what our legacy will be.”
Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn
“Stephens has written about the Cooles before, and perhaps he will do so again, continuing to supply a necessary if nasty corrective to one of the myths of the moment.”
Bill McKibben, Hungry Mind Review
“His verbal brilliance in recreating their gritty world brings to mind the novels of Flann O’Brien...Michael Stephens has provided an inspiring elegy for a man, a family and a way of life.”
Eamonn Wall, The Washington Post Book World
“Not since Eugene O’Neill and James T. Farrell has a writer hurled his brilliance so passionately at an Irish American family in order to burn away all trace of false sentimentality and illuminate a core rotten with alcoholism, violence and despair.”
Ephraim Paul, Philadelphia Inquirer
M. G. Stephens (Michael Gregory Stephens) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and further out on Long Island, into a family of sixteen children. His father came from Ireland and his mother was from an old New England family whose ancestors included a North African indentured servant to the Wheelock family, the founders of Dartmouth College. His mother grew up in a 27-room Brooklyn mansion on Madison near Stuyvesant, right where Spike Lee shot Do the Right Thing, which was also a few blocks from where Stephens lived as a child. He has been around boxing all his life. He also worked various jobs, including a stint in the Merchant Marine, greens-keeping, being a caddy, Christmas tree salesman on the Lower East Side, gas-pump jockey, dishwasher, East Asia correspondent, bartender, and of course journeyman boxer and sparring partner. He lived for many years (15) in London, but now resides just north of Chicago, and has been exiled from New York for over twenty-five years. Kid Coole is the third novel about the Coole family, the other two being The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole, whose fiftieth anniversary of its publication by E. P. Dutton is in 2022. These novels comprise The Coole Trilogy. Besides Kid Coole, Spuyten Duyvil has just published Stephens' novel, King Ezra, about Ezra Pound.
