Purchase River of Angels

From the biographer of John Fante, ten stories of blood relations, ancestral revenants, random forces, and the swerves and cruelties of love. Set against the polychromatic backdrop of greater Los Angeles, from a hidden wartime bunker and seedy skid-row hellhole to a children’s playground, a studio soundstage, and a glittering hilltop mansion, these are stories about people scrambling to reckon with the hands they’re dealt in the American gamble of their lives.

“Stephen Cooper’s fiction exerts an artist’s probing humanitarian coercion of both characters and readers into honest self-examination. Think Chekhov, Babel, O’Connor, and Carver. In these stories we are compelled to confront startling frailty and experience redemptive insight as Cooper charts a collective moral history of the Southland across time and circumstance.”

—Andrew Tonkovich, editor of Santa Monica Review and host of Bibliocracy Radio on Pacifica Network KPFK 90.7.