Ed Falco On the Air

Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic short story about the mask we wear in public and the chaos of individual identity that lives confused and potentially dangerous beneath that mask.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

 In Chicago, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, fires are burning, violence has broken out on the west side, and a young man who lives alone in a sixth-floor walkup is annoyed by a banging on his bedroom wall coming from the next door neighbor's apartment. When he goes to her (the neighbor's) apartment to complain, what began with a mysterious thumping on his bedroom wall evolves with an invitation that leads to a game, and then into something more intimate and unexpected, as all the while, beyond their building's walls and windows, fires burn and history's violence goes on unabated.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

A short story by Ed Falco, narrated by Anthony, a New Yorker crossing the country by van with his fiancée, Vivian, who has spent her life in the West and loves it with something like devotion. As they drive through Wyoming, Anthony finds himself unnerved by the vast, barren landscape. What begins as a romantic trip—one Vivian has imagined as a kind of extended honeymoon before the wedding—quickly gives way to friction. When a miscalculation leaves them far from their intended destination, they pull off the road into an empty stretch of desert, where the silence and isolation seem to heighten everything between them, including the strange and ever shifting boundaries of intimacy. Send us Fan MailSupport the show

Kyle Minor's short story, “Glossolalia,” consists entirely of dialogue between a young man and woman negotiating the rifts between faith and desire. Part of Minor's collection, Praying Drunk, “Glossolalia” is about many things, including language, belief, and the difficulty of communication.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

A short story by Alyson Hagy. “Semper Paratus”—the Coast Guard motto, meaning “Always Ready”—follows Randall, the lone woman in a Coast Guard rescue crew stationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, nicknamed the graveyard of the Atlantic. The story unfolds in the aftermath of a disturbing rescue attempt, and like much of Hagy’s writing, it’s less interested in melodrama than in the complicated emotional residue left behind: guilt, endurance, rivalry, loneliness, and the strange intimacies forged under pressure. Send us Fan MailSupport the show

A neighborhood bar where the floors are sticky, the air is thick with smoke, and the past lingers just beneath the surface of every conversation. An award-winning short story by Steve Gibson.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

A veteran of the war in Vietnam takes his teenage daughter to a Marilyn Manson concert, where a string of disturbing events begin.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

"Wild Girls" begins in a bar in the East Village, where a succesful middle-aged artist who earns a living as a mentor and teacher of young, aspiring artists, finds himself in the company of two young women, one a current and the other a former student of his. What starts as a playful, then provocative, and finally a reckless firtation, quickly turns into something more complicated.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

In Matthew Vollmer's short story "Oh Land of National Paradise, How Glorious Are They Bounties," the life of a young man working as a waiter in Yellowstone Park gets complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's girlfriend—and even more complicated when that best friend dies suddenly and tragically.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

In her short story "The Heart of Things," Kristina Gorcheva Newberry explores the fraught relationship between three women: a mother and her two adult daughters. Carmen, the younger daughter, has been living in the U.S. for 17 years, while her mother and Leezy, her sister, have remained at home in the Soviet Union. It's not easy to say what this story is about, though certainly it concerns the distance, both psychological and cultural, between the thoroughly Americanized and socially liberal Carmen, and her traditional and socially conservative Russian mother and sister. But as much as it's about their differences, it's also about their connection--and that, for me, is where the magic of the story resides. Send us Fan MailSupport the show