The Evening News is Tony Ardizzone's first collection of stories, and winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection is a small press book published in 1986 by the University of Georgia Press.
Themes.
Set mostly in Chicago's blue-collar neighborhoods, these stories focus on subjects that concern or interest us all: disease and death, vandalism and sacrilege, rape and infidelity, Catholicism, baseball, lost love.
Contents.
A son resolves his mounting grief over his mother's imminent death by recalling the stories she has told all her life.
Gino, an adolescent, believes two of his classmates have seen Christ. Later, he questions his faith.
The husband and wife look at their pasts—his as an activist in the sixties and hers as a believer in reincarnation and the tarot—in light of the news stories they watch on television each evening, and question whether they should bring a child into the world.
Tells of a young man teetering on the brink of adulthood, and finally finding hope and reassurance from the remembered sound of his bus-driver father's laugh, from remembered phrases such as "Move away from the window, lady, can't you see I'm driving" and "If you ain't got a quarter or a token there, grandma, you and your purse can get off at the next stop."
A young girl is raped by her boyfriend.
A young man drives past his old girlfriend's house and recalls their time together and how he interacted with her family.
A man gardens and attempts to connect with a new home.
Young adults involved in a peaceful wartime protest are beaten by the police.
Peter picks his Catholic, Italian American parents up from the airport and drives them around in his pickup. He pretends to be searching for the church he claims to attend, though he is lying.
a bartender and former varsity pitcher for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini finds the actual events of the most cataclysmic day in his past unequal to their impact on his life and so rewrites them in his mind, adding an ill-placed banana peel, a falling meteor, and a careening truck in order to create a more fitting climax and finally to leave those memories behind him.
An elderly widow walking the streets of the once-flourishing Italian neighborhood around Taylor Street on Chicago's Near West Side. To those around her she appears doddering, maybe crazy, but she doesn't see herself that way at all. The old lady's mind wanders as she confronts the changes in the place and the people. She flashes back to what the area was like before the mayor allowed the university to take over the land and force the shopkeepers to take flight.
Reviews.
"Ardizzone's detached tone and fine eye for significant details bring his characters and their emotions alive. Lovers of short fiction should look forward to more of his work." -Joan Mooney of "St. Petersburg Times"
"These are tough, menacing stories in which fate and memory exercise their Hardylike sway, all narrated in a variety of inventive and accomplished voices." -Tom Dowling of the "San Francisco Examiner"
"Ardizzone's stories also have a political bite to them, adding a deepened dimension, a fuller realization to his characters and giving them a particular social context often missing in other young writers." -David E. Anderson from "The Seattle Times"