For a long time now, Edward Falco has quietly established his place among the absolute best American storytellers. Those who haven't yet read him don't want to miss this chance. That's why we're so excited to offer the very best of his work, gathered together here for the first time, to a wider readership. Falco's stories are unforgettable, dangerous as a high-wire act without a net, filled with dramatic action, and peopled with believable characters challenged by events into making risky moral choices, so emotionally true that readers will carry them around for a long time. In story after story, Falco's characters find the order of their lives ambushed by an upswelling of dark forces beyond their control. In order to protect the lives of family--lovers, wives, and especially children--they often must summon up the personal courage to turn from their own private monsters. The decisions they make reveal their bonds, the set of their hearts, and the harsh nature of the culture we all live in today. If someone out there could write the contemporary counterpart to Flannery O'Connor's classic "A Good Man is Hard to Find," it would be Falco. His are good, old-fashioned, hard-to-find stories set way out there on the edge.
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.
