from The Family Corleone:

Carmella rested her head on Vito’s shoulder. “I worry,” she said. “All this . . .” She took a step back to gesture around her at the house and the compound. “All this,” she repeated and she looked up to Vito. “I worry for you.”
“You always worried,” Vito said, “and yet here we are.” He touched her eyes, as if wiping away tears. “Look,” he said. “Tom’s in college. He’ll be a hotshot lawyer soon. Everybody’s fine and healthy.”
“Si,” Carmella said. “We’ve been lucky.” She straightened out her dress. “Did you talk to Sonny about Sandrinella? That boy . . . I worry for his soul.”
Vito put his hands on her cheeks. “Sonny’s going to be fine. I promise. He’ll work his way up in the automobile business. I’ll help him. In time, god willing, he’ll be making more money than I could ever dream of. Him and Tommy and Michael and Fredo, our children will be like the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers. With me to help, they’ll be rich beyond measure and then they’ll take care of us when we’re old.”
Carmella grasped Vito’s hands by the wrists, pulled them away from her face, and put them around her waist. “You believe that?” she asked, and she pressed her cheek against his neck.
“If I didn’t believe that was possible . . .” Vito stepped back and took her by the hand. “If I didn’t believe that was possible,” he said, “I’d still be working as a clerk at Genco’s. Now,” he added, and he lead her toward the kitchen and the back door, “everybody’s waiting.”

Burning Man

Falco remains one of the most powerful short fiction writers of his generation.––The Notre Dame Review

At once gritty and visionary, Falco’s stories combine the nerve and edge of classic noir fiction with a transcendent lyricism. This synthesis––of the sinister and immanent, evil and sublime––gives his work its indelible emotional depth and uncanny resonance. The sensibility is somewhat akin to that of Chandler or Carver, yet Falco’s fiction is as distinctive as it is mesmerizing. No one has written anything quite like these deeply engrossing, lovely-harrowing stories. --Alice Fulton, author of The Nightingales of Troy

A splendid book of stories that ravish and ennoble and hearten, even as the news remains bad. Falco has more talent than ought to be legal or mortal. I can't imagine a better book of stories will be published this year. —Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories

Ed Falco is an enchanter who casts his spell with what Ford Madox Ford called the ‘fresh usual word,’ with impeccable sentences, and with unerring and exquisite details. These unsettling explorations of men at a dangerous age, whose quiet lives are often haunted and shaped by loss, are savvy, fearless, and achingly beautiful. Burning Man represents Ed Falco at the height of his considerable narrative powers. What talent, what nerve, what a wondrous and spellbinding collection. —John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass.

Saint John of the Five Boroughs

In times of ordinary violence, Falco’s superbly engaging novel is a primer in the art of picking up the pieces. —American Book Review

A saga of a family ruptured and an artist discovering herself, in which far-flung elements knit together skillfully, movingly—and not a little frighteningly.  As always in Falco, the drama is dominated by its women, seen frankly yet with empathy.  Early missteps all but hobble the women here, younger and older.  But this winning accomplishment, a new benchmark for its author, reminds us that few things can be so beautiful as a scar.—John Domini on Emerging Writers’ Network

An enjoyable read, a rich and redolent work that recaptures an evocative experience of simply settling down and getting lost in a good book.— Blogcritics.org

Wolf Point

Think of Edward Falco as William Blake with cinematic potential. As with Blake's famed paeans to the lamb and the "tyger tyger, burning bright," Falco's novel seeks to "shew the two contrary states of the human soul," to dissect innocence and experience down to the rumbling guts. . . . Falco goes deep to explore themes of purity and corruption, beauty and decay, stupidity and wisdom . . . ––Tiffany Lee Youngren, The San Diego Union-Tribune

. . . Readers fond of stripped-down thrill rides through a dark, Gothic world will settle happily into their reading chairs. But as lean as it is, "Wolf Point" is up to something more complicated. On a deeper level, it is about the knowability of the self. Whether we can ever know ourselves or -- perhaps more troubling -- ever really know others. --. . . a cunning exercise that playfully thwarts its readers' expectations. ––Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch (Front Page Review)

Falco's prose is cold and brisk, with occasional flashes of hard-boiled eloquence, and the story hurtles like a brakeless truck toward its bloody denouement. ––Sunday New York Times Book Review

Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha

What is truly imaginative in these characters is the sense of vulnerability, like a fine patina, over the coarseness of their exteriors. These are real men and women who grapple with a stark reality that often reveals the complexity of existing in a world fraught with danger—frequently a danger welling from within. . . . Perhaps this is Falco’s greatest strength as a writer, his ability to refract the edgy depths of doubt, fear, and rage so that the reader finds herself saying, “Yes, that’s how it is. That could be me.” —Jen Henderson in New Pages.Com

As one might surmise from Falco's titles, he is an original and vivid writer. In this outstanding collection, Falco excels at depicting the darkness that lurks within, yet he addresses this gritty reality with a soaring lyricism. --Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist

Edward Falco, in his collection of short stories, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories, stylistically recalls the grotesque of Flannery O'Connor, the economy of diction of Ernest Hemingway, and the 'Dirty Realism' of Raymond Carver, with stories that hauntingly expose the grit and challenge of the everyman and everywoman -- characters who are us at the most primal of levels, but who are, too, the freakish darker parts of we who would only imagine doing or enduring what his characters endure and do. ––Magill Book Reviews

Falco remains one of the most powerful short fiction writers of his generation.
––The Notre Dame Review

Falco's stories convey an intensity of feeling that all too many contemporary stories are missing. A Falco story can be depended on to be interesting––keenly observed and deeply explored––compelling in a way that makes one want to read every word.
––Stuart Dybek