Stephen Cooper on River of Angels Pt 1

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Thursday, January 15 at 2:30 PM on KPFK 90.7 FM: My guest this week and next is Stephen Cooper, the leading biographer, scholar, and booster of the writer John Fante. He is winner of an NEA for his fiction, a filmmaker, and creative writing teacher at CSULB for many years.  He is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and cowrote and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski.

Cooper is my guest today because he writes remarkable short stories, fiction which has appeared widely, including in The ThreePenny Review, American Fiction and the Santa Monica Review. Now ten of his short stories are collected in a volume titled River of Angels, out from the literary collective What Books Press --- the river being both metaphorical and very real indeed and the angels being human or imagined or fallen if always redeemable. This is a gorgeous and defining collection with a cover by legendary artist Gronk. I taped an hour with Cooper, who reads from three stories. Tune in next week for Part 2.

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