Acid (Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction)

In this award-winning collection of short stories Edward Falco narrates the lives and times of our contemporaries, characters off the dizzying streets of end of the century America. Within these pages we meet such characters as Matt, the Midwestern boy who turns his back on an apple-pie lifestyle for the dubious pleasures of life as a drug-smuggler and guitarist for the Flesh Puppets; and Jim Renkowski, drug dealer turned family man whose run-in with the past is only as bad as his worst nightmare. Through characters like these, Falco unmasks the difficult truths that engage us at the deepest levels of our being. The stories in Acid entertain and engage us and, in the end, make new again some of the oldest and most intractable human struggles.