Finalist, 1993 Best Novel of the West
—Western Writers of America—“In The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S—Bergon’s most inventive, overtly innovative novel—two monks seeking a mystical vision get involved in fights still being waged today over nuclear waste. New West diversity is dramatized by a variety of characters, including the two monks, a government nuclear test site agent, modern-day Shoshone people, a hermetic Basque prospector, a Mexican American Bureau of Land Management worker, and Nathan Spock who hosts a Las Vegas TV talk show.”—Allen Wier, Los Angeles Review of Books, January 1, 2022
“The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S is a delightful surprise. What makes the novel work is a prose style that is both lush and crisp and the sharply realized characters.”— Lee Lem in Prairie Schooner
“Temptations is a wise and humorous tale of destruction and compassion, a piece of the never-ending story of the American West as it occurs in these last years of the century.” — Joy Harjo, author of In Mad Love and War
“Temptations has erotic intensity, comic genius and moral vision, an uncanny combination that works perfectly and boldly. A true battle of giants—Ancient Wisdom versus Progress—is taking place here, and the actual landscape of twentieth-century America is being shaken. A brilliant, incorrigible, enchanting, and powerful book.”
—Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
“Bergon is a fine storyteller, and his novel is vivid and compelling.”
— William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky
“In this wonderfully witty, randy and rambunctious novel, Frank Bergon seizes on the spiritual concerns that govern each of us, on those days when we’re willing to admit it.”
— Larry Woiwode, author of Beyond the Bedroom Wall
“Temptations is written in the muscular, unadulterated, and intelligent prose that makes Frank Bergon one of the best writers not just of the American West but of the American moment.”
— John Vernon, author of Lucky Billy
“The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S is terrific. I thought his Shoshone Mike was outstanding, but this novel is even more impressive. Bergon has done an extraordinary job of crafting a powerful story out of personal, spiritual, and ecological crises, and showing us vividly how all three are one. Temptations is an important novel, one I believe will establish Bergon very firmly as a major western writer.”
— Louis Owens, author of Bone Game
Frank Bergon 