On M. G. Stephens

“M. G. Stephens is a writer forever interested in the endless wandering mystery of being human.”
Joan Silber

“Michael Stephens’ voice prowls through his own experience with a savage yet lyrical intensity.”
Rudolph Wurlitzer

“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.

“It’s an eloquent style that calls for reading aloud, an urban Irish style perhaps, perfect for nipping out the back door, rolling garbage cans as obstacles after you, and loping over the rooftops to safety in a vacant lot.”
Rolling Stone

“One of the absolute mysteries of art is that it can depict the ugly, the revolting, and the nauseating so that the attractiveness of the performance, and its truth, balance the grime of the subject matter.”
Guy Davenport

“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

“M.G. Stephens’ book 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   

“...a work of astonishing virtuosity, erudition, and wit, at once moving, surprising, pleasurable, and as exquisitely twisted as a climbing vine."
—Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House and Gold Star Road  

“...a major book by a writer who should be better-known. Michael Stephens' range is astonishing; his lines are elegantly crafted from the heart and the imagination.”
            —Alan Ziegler, writer and former director of Creative Writing at Columbia University

"Don't touch this book unless you value genuine talent wherever it shows. But it can't be denied. It shows."
L. A. Times

"...brilliant, scorching, a superbly gifted writer and survivor.”
Ann Douglas, author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

“Michael Stephens is one of the most consistently powerful and self-insightful personal essayists in America. This memoir is as essential as it is unnerving, as generous as it is astringent.”
Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay

"This is a quirky, good, bar-crawling, black-Irish, though also bookish, memoir that makes me homesick for Michael Stephens' and my natal city, New York. God bless him."
Edward Hoagland, author of The Courage of Turtles

“In his essays, Stephens speaks in a living voice that personalizes his subjects...Not pretty, but true. Not just true, but beautiful in the expression of it. The author is available to those who want the real thing."
Jerome Klinkowitz, Chicago Tribune

"These are the very rich hours of Michael Stephens' midlife passage. Crossed by light, wind, memory and love of things fragile, these little poetry boats carry forth the human burden. These are the lyric proses of one of America's best loved lit sailors."
Andrei Codrescu