Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood

by Tony Ardizzone

Tony Ardizzone writes of the moments in our lives that shine, that burn in the dim expanse of memory with the intensity and vivid light of the evening news. The men and women in these stories tend to arrange their days, order their pasts, plan their futures in the light of such moments, finding epiphanies in the glowing memory of a father's laugh or a mother's repeated story, in a broken date or a rained-out ball game. Set mostly in Chicago's blue-collar neighborhoods, these stories focus on subjects that concern us disease and death, vandalism and sacrilege, rape and infidelity, lost love. In "My Mother's Stories" a son resolves his mounting grief over his mother's imminent death by recalling the stories she has told all her life. "My Father's Laugh" 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." The husband and wife in the title story 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. And in "The Walk-On," 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. Searching their pasts for clues to the present, searching the horizons of their days for love, the characters in The Evening News seek, and sometimes find, redemption in a world of uncertainty and brightly burning emotions.

155 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1996

About the author

Tony Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago. He is the author of seven books of fiction, including The Arab’s Ox, an updated edition of his previously published interconnected collection of stories set in Morocco, Larabi’s Ox. The February 2018 release of The Arab’s Ox marks the 25th anniversary of the book’s publication. Ardizzone is also the author of four novels: The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. His short story collections include The Evening News and Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood.

Ardizzone has been awarded two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction sponsored by the Friends of Literature, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Award, the Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize, the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award, the Black Warrior Review Literary Award in Fiction, and the Cream City Review Editors' Award in Nonfiction.

Ardizzone also edited the anthology The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop. Previously he served as the managing editor of three volumes of the Intro series, published by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. After the series became dormant, as a member of AWP’s Board of Directors Ardizzone founded and launched the organization’s Intro Journals Project and served as its managing editor for the project’s first two years. In 2010 he wrote the foreword to the newly released paperback edition of Raymond DeCapite's classic novel The Coming of Fabrizze.

Reviews

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ardizzone writes about the old neighborhood like few people can: he writes wonderful characters who engage the (new) world, their histories, and their search for a better life. There's a bit of Stu Dybek in some of these stories, a bit of Grace Paley, but truly, Ardizzone is his own writer.

[Mitchell Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing short stories; sorry it took me 26 years to find them! Being from Chicagoland, myself, these stories had that extra "place" factor, adding to my enjoyment of these stories. But these are stories that all lovers of short fiction should read, written by a real master of the short story form. Moving, real, gritty, but written with an empathetic eye, these are moving, engaging stories. A should-be classic among them is the final piece, "Holy Cards" which definitely left me wanting to read much more of the author's work. Read this book if you haven't already!

[Billhotto · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these stories. They involve young Catholic boys living on the North Side of Chicago the late 1950's and early 60's. Which is exactly who, where and what I was a half century or so ago. As a result I may be a bit prejudiced, although I can bear witness to Ardizzone's successful evocation of both the much changed environment and the constant emotions. Childhood is different today, but being a child remains the same. Chicago, that "somber city", plays a part here, as it does with Nelson Algren's stories, albeit in a very different character. The nuns and Riverview and the Daleys (for now) are gone, but the Clark Street bus still rolls past Wrigley Field and the lake is still east of everything. The stories are not really nostalgic, too much pain and too much shame. The world was contained in a few city blocks, but the Holy Spirit could be found in a lost pigeon. The young dream and the old remember, a talented and humane writer like Ardizzone helps bridge that gap.