Green Dreams: Essays Under the Influence of the Irish - Hardcover

Michael Stephens

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820316164 ISBN 13: 9780820316161

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1994

Synopsis

Stephens, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, ponders the truth in the stereotypes of the Irish as writers, fighters, and drinkers. The essays touch on boxing; gangsters; Irish authors such as Joyce, Beckett and Yeats; and the author's own experiences with alcoholism and recovery. Somehow W.C. Fields, Ernest Hemingway, Bill Griffith (the creator of Zippie the Pinhead), and James Cagney find their way into Stephens' terrain, making for an interesting journey through the author's personal landscape. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of essays by the noted Irish-American novelist Stephens, author of The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (Fiction Forecasts, Jan. 3), is something worse than a marathon conversation with a drunk, for the talker here is a well-read literary man who has stopped drinking and won't let you forget it. If drink and literary endeavor have anything in common, it is perhaps their orality: in this case, deprived of one mode, Stephens wildly overindulges in the other. Structured in three parts--"Fighting," "Writing" and "Drinking"--the book sets forth a trinity of pursuits that are hardly in need of the kind of hyperbolic ennobling Stephens gives them. The essays in the first section are at best raw outtakes from his novels about life in Brooklyn; in the essays on that other Irish trinity--Joyce, Beckett and Yeats--Stephens's observations are steeped in vats of blarney--"At the banquet of the moderns, you will find even the poets step back from the feast until the prosemaster Joyce is seated." One can only imagine an audience of Irish grandchildren for these grandiose pronouncements. The book's final essays, maudlin reminiscences about the romance and horrors of boozing, are certainly vindications of the man who stopped drinking, but they are unflattering of the man who couldn't stop writing about it.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Playwright and novelist Stephens ( Brooklyn Book of the Dead , LJ 11/1/93) groups his autobiographical pieces on "the world of the Irish American" into three sections--fighting, writing, and drinking. By writing through these and other stereotypes, Brooklyn-born Stephens tries to transcend the narrow roles that have limited him and that often turn an examination of the urban "mick" into a bad James Cagney imitation. As a writer, he also deals with the looming reputation of the great Irish writers (Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, et al.). Stephens's world, and his writing, have a peculiarly masculine, somewhat outmoded Hemingway-esque manner. For good or ill, the world he portrays, with its drinking binges, brawls, and memories of the old country, has vanished as completely as some of the New York neighborhoods he recalls here. Recommended primarily for general collections and also for those on substance abuse or Irish literature.
- Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. , Carbondale
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0820316164
• ISBN 13: 9780820316161
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 210