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Overview
Seventy-year-old F.X. Toole has exploded onto the literary scene with this astonishing first collection of stories drawn from his own experiences in boxing. In these powerful and moving tales, he reveals a complex web of athletes, trainers, and promoters and their extended families, all players in an unforgiving business where victory, like defeat, comes at a dark and painful price.
F. X. Toole breathes life into vivid, compelling characters who radiate the fierce intensity of the worlds they inhabit. In "The Monkey Look," an aging cut man with an incorrigible sweet tooth works the corner for Hoolie, a featherweight "bleeder" with attitude. "Black Jew" brings Reggie Valentine Love and his camp to a brutal elimination bout in Atlantic City, where they are treated like second-class citizens by a promoter. In "Million $$$ Baby," seasoned trainer Frankie Dunn faces the most daunting challenge of his life when he agrees to aid the fearless Maggie Fitzgerald in her quest to become a champion boxer. "Fightin' in Philly" and "Frozen Water" are stories in which youthful dreams of glory and celebrity are threatened by the harsh realities that suffuse both of these narratives. The novella "Rope Burns" is the crowning achievement of the collection, offering a gritty, heartrending account of the indestructible bond that develops between a devoted fighter and his trainer.
In Rope Burns F.X. bole exhibits the skill of a miniaturist: in precise and exquisite detail, he peoples a world rich in unforgettable characters, like Señora Cabrera, the owner of the Acapulco café, who makes low-fat refried beans to keep a local fighter in top form, and an anonymous museum guard with a soft spot for Michelangelo. Toole's faithful dialogue crackles and bites, and the flawed characters he creates cannot help but remind us of our own too fragile humanity. He brings a new understanding to the violence and purity of the sweet science and the world it engenders, opening a window into the fighter's soul that can never he closed.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New WritersF. X. Toole is, in fact, a great new writer, but he's no newcomer to his subject matter. With twenty-two years logged in and out of the boxing ring as a trainer and "cut man," there's no better craftsman to tell these "stories from the corner." Compelled to continue in the game that is boxing-an often dangerous, corrupt business, where winners are often not what they appear-Toole's five tales and a novella clearly ring with authenticity, mapped out in the four corners of the ring and in the dark chambers of a fighter's heart. The hard-earned sweat drips off the pages, the punches sting, and the sound of leather meeting flesh claps out. Toole is a gifted artist and a very real contender in the world of fiction.
"The best boxing short fiction ever written."
— James Ellroy, author of L. A. Confidential
"Rope Burns is utterly fascinating, a complete and generous vision of a world most of us can never approach, still less enter."
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde
James Ellroy
Rope Burns is the best boxing fiction since Leonard Gardner's Fat City. It's the best boxing short fiction ever written. F.X. Toole is the brilliant love child of Sonny Liston and a rabid pit bull. Rope Burns is a hymn to ferocious longing and loss.Dan Rather
Rope Burns is not just fight fiction at its finest, it is excellent fiction, period.Joyce Carol Oates
F.X. Toole is a writer to break the heart. Rope Burns is utterly fascinating, a complete and generous vision of a world most of us can never approach, still less unpredictable and suspenseful, but most of all they are achingly real. Toole reads like one who has journeyed to Hades and back, bursting with tales to tell of what he has seen. He's the Archie Moore of his craft.New York Post
Move over Frank and Malachy McCourt. A new gray-haired, streetwise Irish-American writer appears to be ready to burst upon the publishing world.Bart Schneider
It's been a long time since I read a book that made me stand up so often to get in sync with the way the characters move. Never before has a book made me want to buy a speed bag to hang in the basement...The writing in Rope Burns is crisp and jablike, and you get the feeling that Toole has trained a long time for this debut. Clearly, he can go the distance.Publishers Weekly -
The story of the 69-year-old author of this astonishing first fiction collection is a salutary one; he wrote between gigs tending boxers in their corners as a "cut man" (who stanches the blood flow and allows fights to continue), finally got a story published by a small literary magazine, was spotted by a keen-eyed agent and achieved book publication. It's amazing it took so long, because Irish-born Toole, now living and working in Los Angeles, is a natural. His knowledge of the bizarre world of professional boxing is encyclopedic and utterly persuasive, his prose is as tight as a well-laced pair of gloves and his protagonists, in this collection of five stories and a novella, are mythically heroic (and occasionally evil) but convincing archetypes. "The Money Look" is an exquisite turning-the-tables yarn at the expense of a cynical crook of a fighter; "Black Jew" is a telling tale of humble ambition woven with the lure of big money. A lacerating account of a courageous, deeply endearing hillbilly woman fighter and her sad fate, "Million $$$ Baby," is arguably the best story in the book. "Fightin' in Philly" is an almost equally moving tale of the toll the ambition to be a title fighter takes on a man. Another innocent torn up by the fight game is portrayed in "Frozen Water." Only the title novella, "Rope Burns," falls somewhat behind the sterling standard set by the other stories, with their firm authority and dead-on dialogue. It is more ambitious, even operatic, in its pitting of an almost superhumanly noble Olympic contender against a low-life East Los Angeles gang member at the time of the Rodney King riots. Like all of Toole's stories, it's breathlessly readable, even though the climactic bloodshed feels forced, as if Toole's cool narrative style cannot bear so much melodramatic freight. But make no mistake, the man is a heavyweight fiction contender. Agent, Nat Sobel. 6-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Library Journal
A boxing cut man uses swabs, pressure, ice, and home-mixed salve to stop his fighter's bleeding between rounds. Toole, 70, whose experience as a cut man inspired this hard-boiled debut collection of contemporary fight stories, writes with blunt authority about this world. His strongest tales feature old trainers or cut men like himself, wisely noble holdovers from boxing's Hibernian age. Toole's old-fashioned modern stories often deal in broad ethnic types--hillbillies and homeboys, "4-dollar whores," Irish trainers exclaiming "Jaysus!"--but the real fight world is littered with such contrasts. His coldly plotted novella "Million $$$ Baby" begins like the most familiar old pulp story of the grumpy veteran trainer and the eager would-be student; then Toole freshens the clich by making the boxer an innocent young woman from the Ozarks. Here and there, though, Toole's authenticity breaks down, as in the unconvincing stories that lean heavily on black street dialog, "Frozen Water" and "Black Jew." Overall, his tales distinguish themselves by staying in the heartbreaking thick of it, never using boxing na vely as a savage metaphor for life (some life!). As a storyteller, Toole is both sentimental as a bar song and as cruelly precise as the sport he chronicles. Recommended for large fiction collections.--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\The New Yorker
Riveting stories...A less confident author might try to dress up such simple material with flashy prose. But Toole is a traditionalist, enamored of boozy romanticism and colorful vernacular, and when he throws a punch it usually finds its target.Valberg
[A] magnificent debut...You may feel you've gone a couple of rounds yourself after this emotional wallop of a read.—Entertainment Weekly
Allen Barra
Toole's prose is sharp and jablike, and at its best comes at you with the rhythm of a good gym fighter working on the speed bag. Toole has a talent for illuminating the thoughts of the near illiterate but streetwise... this is an impressive collection...—The New York Times Book Review