Drama. Irish American Studies. A one-act play that originally ran off-broadway for five years, OUR FATHER is about sons lamenting the death of their father at an Irish wake in a New York City bar. "The script is intellectual, brilliant and irreverently caustic. Each brothergives a eulogy which describes, through improbable fantasies which in any people but the Irish would be called hallucinations, how he murdered the dear departed. A tour-de-force"--The Scotsman.

Our Father

Literature & Fiction

Stephens, M. G.

Dramas & Plays

Spuyten Duyvil

The prose pieces ... only occasionally have the descriptive, reflexive feel of prose poems.... more often meditations or brief fictions, reminiscent in their mastery of tone of the shorter prose pieces of Gilbert Sorrentino.... wonderfully varied versions of Hamlet, the play, the role, the character. Yorick, Gertrude, Ophelia and even a remote, lost father pass through very concrete versions of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Ireland and Scotland.—Michael Anania

History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion

Humor & Satire

MadHat Press

M. G. Stephens has written a novel about one of the most controversial figures of the Modernist movement—Ezra Pound. During the Second World War, Ezra Pound worked as a propagandist for the Italian Fascists, helping their cause with his regular broadcasts over the radio. This activity led to Pound’s being charged with treason, though he would never be put on trial for it. Instead, he was committed to a hospital in Washington, D.C. for the criminally insane for more than a decade. King Ezra takes the reader from Ezra Pound’s incarceration by the U. S. military after World War II, up to his final days in Venice in the early 1970s. M. G. Stephens draws upon his literary reserves as a poet, fiction writer, and playwright to tell this tragic story of a flawed genius. 
Stephens’ prose can be quick, idiomatic or inward looking and contemplative, but it is everywhere vivid, engaging and surprising. 
Michael Anania 
Michael Stephens’ range is astonishing; his sentences are elegantly crafted from the heart and the imagination. 
Alan Ziegler\nHere is what readers are saying about M. G. Stephens’ most recent book, 
History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion (MadHat Press, 2021) 
I love the way this gorgeous meditation veers with daring and grace between poetry and prose, between art and life. 
—Hilma Wolitzer 
M.G. Stephens’ History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion is the seasoned work of a pure poet and fiction writer, a marriage of the concise and lyrical, suffused with both moments of keenly observed humanity and flights of luminous rumination. 
—Richard Price, author of The Wanderers and Lush Life 
The whole is funny, grave and grand. Simply terrific. 
—George Szirtes, author of Reel and 
The Burning of the Books 
A totally captivating genre-bending set of monologues, well, no, let’s say prose poems—well, let’s say—what a voice! 
—Miranda Beeson, author of Catch & Release

King Ezra

United States

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

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

Kid Coole

Literary

SIXMILEBRIDGE

Poetry

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