![]() |
Acid| University of Notre Dame Press, 1996 | ||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||
![]() |
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
Falco's stories are about the emptiness under the slogans and mundane enthusiasms we cling to. __ Toward the end of "Tell Me What It Is," one of the best realized stories in this impressive collection, a married man, naked in a tidal pool with his friend's wife, tries to coax her into having sex. "There is nothing to life but moments like this. Intense moments like this," he urges. Like acid (the LSD of the title story), whose ability to "shake up life" is a promise at once pathetic and potent, the brilliance of Falco's stories lies in their ability to make us feel both the pathetic cant and the potent yearning within such expressions of human desire. ––Philip Gambone in Italian Americana
Falco writes tense, gritty fiction that portrays ordinary people caught between the claims of "normal" life and the lure of the forbidden and untasted. ... Battling or grieving families, unstable and endangered relationships, assume haunting accusatory shape in 13 pellucid stories that are stylistically akin to the plays of David Mamet or Sam Shepard. Falco's voice, though, is his own, and his work keeps getting better and better. ––Kirkus Reviews
Falco uses violence in story after story, not to reassure but to bring his characters to their senses. _ Fine stories like these--stories that interweave and build on one another--are worth any number of those long, uninspired novels of the season. ––Dean Flower in The Hudson Review
Falco is at his best when he is walking a tightrope between satire and empathy, and the ways he maintains his balance are very pleasurable to behold. ––Marshall Bruce Gentry in Studies in Short Fiction
|