Professor Stanley Morris's orderly world of teaching, scholarship, and committee meetings is shaken when he gets the surprise so many men of his age dread—a diagnosis of prostate cancer. In his struggle to keep his sense of humor, his identity, and his dignity, Stanley emerges as a sort of Everyman as he stoically makes his way through his physical and spiritual ordeal. Stanley's spirit, his loyalty to his wife and family and students and to his place in his university community are at the heart of this small gem of an impressionistic novel.
MARSHALL TERRY, a former department chair and associate provost at Southern Methodist University where he has taught for five decades, is the author of seven works of fiction, as well as numerous essays and reviews. He thinks of Stanley Morris as a distillation, like fine aged Scotch, of his own physical and professional experiences. Former president of the Texas Institute of Letters, Terry was honored by that organization in 1991 with the Lon Tinkle Award for "a career of excellence in letters."
What Readers Are Saying:
"The element of Angels Prostate Fall that gilds every scene is its bittersweet humor. Even as Stanley experiences physical discomfort, deals with the loss of loved ones, and faces his own mortality, he retains his self-deprecating sense of humor. He acknowledges to himself his fear of death, of the unknown, but he is so open to the possibilities of life that he is incapable of becoming maudlin. This is a highly readable book, comic and sad by turns, quietly yet deeply moving by its conclusion." --Allen Wier
"Marsh Terry's new novel is very funny and very grim, like one of those grinny candy skulls the Mexican kids get on El Dia de los Muertos, macabre black humor. The whole has a nice tight cycle of being in the world and plummeting out of it and then working a way back into it." --C. W. Smith
"Tender, ironic, decent and sly, Angels Prostate Fall is Marsh Terry at his best-spinning a story about the fear of sexual failure and the specter of mortality that manages to be at the same time both mordantly funny and wondrously hopeful." --Shelby Hearon
"Marshall Terry has captured wonderfully the sweetness and frustration of the island world of contemporary academia. And along the way he's thrown in for good measure universal truths about love and friendship and partnership and fear and courage and duty." --Rick Bass