Tech Professor Falco's Novel a Pre-quel to The Godfather

Virginia Tech's burgeoning literary program will get some more good national exposure shortly when English Professor Ed Falco's prequel to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is published. It is scheduled to be out in June 2012, published by Grand Central Publishing.

Ed Falco

The book is titled The Family Corleone and is a novel is based on an un-produced screenplay by Puzo and set in New York in 1933 before the Corleones’ rise to power.

A Tech press release quotes Publishers Weekly: “The story reveals the history of how Vito Corleone fought to survive in the brutal criminal underworld to become the influential and respected Don in The Godfather. Jamie Raab, executive vice president and publisher of Grand Central, says the novel “both honors the original, and stands on its own as a Godfather novel for a new generation of readers.”

Falco is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize in Fiction, Falco has written four story collections, three novels, and several plays, in addition to poems, essays, and book reviews. He is director of the English department’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, and he edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing.