Stephen Cooper's RIVER OF ANGELS

My friend and colleague, Stephen Cooper, recently published his debut collection of short stories, RIVER OF ANGELS (What Books, 2025). An examination of both the landscape and mindscape of Southern California, this collection delivers subtle, quotidian surprises on nearly every page. Since Cooper's first book was a biography of John Fante, it's not unexpected to see Fante's shadow haunting the outermost edges of these stories. Other important influences pervade RIVER OF ANGEL'S arid landscapes as well. Andrew Tonkovich, editor of SANTA MONICA REVIEW, identifies several of them in his perceptive cover blurb: Isaac Babel, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, and Flannery O'Connor. 

Upon reaching the conclusion of the collection's fourth story, "The Lash of Saint Francis," I couldn't help but think about the under-acknowledged Scottish writer, George Mackay Brown (whose work influenced the music of Peter Maxwell Davies). I first discovered Brown's fiction as a teenager when I read his 1969 collection, A TIME TO KEEP, and unexpectedly found myself swept away to a distant, cold, isolated world populated by the fishermen and farmers of the Orkney Islands. The stories possessed an ineffable quality that appealed to me for reasons I couldn't quite nail down (perhaps it was my Scottish roots calling out to some hidden part of my brain). Brown often wrote about the trials and travails of conflicted Catholics and did so with simple, straight-forward, unadorned prose. For that reason, I detected Brown's spirit haunting the very edges of "The Lash of Saint Francis," a quiet tale about a fourth grade Catholic school teacher named Theresa Landry whose mounting mental crisis is juxtaposed effectively against the absurd and gaudy backdrop of a cheap carnival that has set up shop in the school's parking lot. In Cooper's stories, the characters are entwined so intimately with their environment that they almost become one and the same, as in this passage from "The Lash of St. Francis":

"The first drop of rain fell on the corner of Theresa's mouth. She licked her lip tasting what it must taste like to lick the newest street in Los Angeles, tarry and granular and unnamed. And then, trembling up from under her, the thunder.

"The downpour came fast and pounding. People were covering themselves, running, splashing through puddles. Theresa walked on, soaking through. Soon all the exposed rides had stopped turning, the whirling caged things, the infernal Ferris wheel. The carnival was almost deserted and still Theresa walked, through swirling veils of rain..."

She is compelled to take a ride in the Cyclo-Rama-Clone, a "small hangar-like enclosure" that reminds Theresa of "an ancient cistern," which only heightens her anxiety. The increasing claustrophobia of this scene fuels the story's climax, a psychological apotheosis for our disorientated grade-school instructor.

Cooper's characters sometimes find themselves both mentally and physically alienated from the rest of society. In "River of Angels," the adrenaline-fueled relationship of two reckless artist-lovers comes to an explosive conclusion "in the shadow of a vaulted overpass" populated by the urban strays of Los Angeles: coyotes, cats, dogs, possums, and even fellow human beings. 

In "Terminal Island," the narrator learns bittersweet truths about his past--as well as his inevitable future--from an old wartime bunker cut off from the rest of the world just beneath the idyllic, oceanview landscape of the Palos Verdes Hills. 

If you want to hear Cooper talking about these stories and more, I recommend listening to his recent two-part BIBLIOCRACY radio interview. Just click HERE and then scroll down to the 1-14-26 and 1-21-26 episodes.

Directly below you will find a link to Cooper's reading at the legendary Beyond Baroque bookstore in Venice, CA from the night of November 21, 2025: 

An Evening with What Books Press & Giant Claw:

And if all that isn't enough for you, Cooper recently published a brand new essay about the work of John Fante ("John Fante, Unwritten") in the most recent edition of the SANTA MONICA REVIEW...