Amazon.com: Acid (Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction) (9780268006471): Edward Falco: Books

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Having already won the Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction, this collection of 13 short stories should earn the author of Plato at Scratch Daniel's and the novel Winter in Florida further recognition. Falco creates nearly perfect short stories filled with interesting characters and wonderfully dramatic situations. Three stand out: First is the title story, about Jerome, a married man whose stability is founded on a violent, drug-filled past. When his friend and protegee Alice reveals she's planning to drop acid, Jerome has to decide how far he's willing to go to protect her. "Smugglers" is the story of Matt, a 22-year-old from America's heartland who is having misgivings about his upcoming debut as a European cocaine smuggler. And "Tell Me What It Is" introduces Barrett, an aging soap opera star who lives "with the knowledge of the nothing at the center of everything." The characterizations are so crisp that it's impossible not to care about these people. Aside from one small, strange quirk?the noticeable repetition of the adjective sylph-like?Falco proves himself to be a sterling practitioner of the short story form.
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From Booklist

This is a gritty, compelling collection of 13 short stories by veteran writer Falco, who is also the author of a previous collection, Plato at Scratch Daniel's (1990), and the novel Winter in Florida (1990). In the title story, Jerome, the owner of a Christian bookstore, nurses young Alice through her first acid trip, drawing unlikely parallels between playing jazz, dropping acid, and praying; he concludes that, although he is settled and sober while Alice is drugged and alone, "They were different and they were the same . . . everybody, wrapped in urging bodies under the dead light of the stars." This tension between domesticity and life on the edge is a recurring theme throughout these stories, in which Matt, an all-American midwestern boy, agrees to smuggle cocaine into Paris, and successful family man Jim Renkowski engages in a dangerous confrontation when his past as a small-time drug dealer comes back to haunt him in a big way. Well crafted and engaging, these stories offer both high drama and deep emotion. Joanne Wilkinson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Edward Falco Page

Ed Falco's novel, The Family Corleone, based on pages extracted from Mario Puzo's Godfather screenplays, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on May 8, 2012. His most recent books include the story collections, Burning Man (SMU, 2011), and the novel Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Unbridled, 2009). Other books include Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled, 2006), Wolf Point, a novel,(Unbridled, 2006) and In the Park of Culture, a collection of short fictions from The University of Notre Dame Press. His earlier works include the novel Winter in Florida, the hypertext novel, A Dream with Demons, the hypertext poetry collection, Sea Island, and a chapbook of prose poem, Concert in the Park of Culture, as well as two collections of short stories: Acid and Plato at Scratch Daniel's & Other Stories. Acid won the Richard Sullivan Prize from the University of Notre Dame, and was a finalist for The Patterson Prize. He has won a number of other prizes and awards for his writing, including an NEA Fellowship in fiction, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction from The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review, The Mishima Prize for Innovative Fiction from The Saint Andrews Review, a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, two Individual Artist's Fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and The Governor's Award for the Screenplay from The Virginia Festival of American Film. His stories have been published widely in journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and TriQuarterly, and collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several anthologies, including, Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium. An early innovator in the field of digital writing, Falco's online work includes Self-Portrait as Child w/Father (Iowa Review Web), Circa 1967-1968 (Eastgate Reading Room), "Charmin' Cleary" (Eastgate Reading Room), and "Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales (with photographer Mary Pinto, in Volume I of The Electronic Literature Collection).

Falco lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he is the director of Virginia Tech's MFA program, and he edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing.