Dead Air

At 4:45 in the morning, before the salespeople arrive and the phones start ringing, a radio station still belongs to the machines. Nick Carvello loves it that way.

When a sharp deal-maker named Reed Callan offers him the chance to build something from scratch - his sound, his talent, his call - Nick says yes. What follows is the story of a company that works until it doesn't, built by people who believe in it until believing costs more than they can pay.

Dead Air moves through the world of regional radio with the authority of someone who has lived inside it: the morning host whose talent is inseparable from his destruction, the sales executive who outworks every man in the room, the accountant who sees the disaster coming before anyone else will admit it, and two partners who discover, too late, that they were never building the same thing.

Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.

Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.

He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.

These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.