Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short Fiction) [Paperback]

Tony Ardizzone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1996

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 all: 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These tales of an Italian-American neighborhood on Chicago's North Side during the 1950s and '60s go further than the usual picturesque ethnic memoir, with Ardizzone (Larabi's Ox) taking them that extra step through added complexity and carefully chosen language. The narrator of "Baseball Fever" recalls how, as a young boy, he confused Catholicism and baseball into one entity, leading to a unique perspective on religion: God "had several legions of good angels (my first lesson in the concept of the deep bench) waiting with drawn swords behind him." Meanwhile, the somewhat slatternly Bobbi plans to seduce her chaste Catholic boyfriend in order to bond with him forever, but instead she angers him in "The Daughter and the Tradesman." In "The Language of the Dead," a boy insists to a "fat Christian brother" that he was not the one who instigated a fight during a school basketball game that resulted in over $300 in damage. And "Ladies' Choice" describes the rituals of attending Sunday night dances for kids where "You don't have to be a Catholic to get in, but Catholics pay fifty cents less." All of these stories distinguish themselves through empathetic portrayals of unexceptional people described in exceptional language.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Tony Ardizzone's neighborhood is the North Side of Chicago and, more specifically, the Italian Catholic neighborhoods that flourished there in the 1950s and 1960s. In a dozen highly polished tales, Ardizzone describes a world that revolves around the church, the family, and work, in that order. Many of the best stories, such as "Holy Cards" and "Baseball Fever," describe Catholic mythology through the eyes of uncomprehending children who try to understand the world they see around them in the context of the religious stories they've heard from the nuns in their schools. Others look at the neighborhood from the eyes of the elderly; "Nonna," for example, gets into the soul and thoughts of an aging Italian woman as she wanders the streets trying to remember why she left her house. Ardizzone's characters are no strangers to tragedy, physical violence, or prejudice, but he writes about them from an attitude of affection, not anger or regret. These stories will have an appeal far beyond the "friendly confines." George Needham

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Product Details

• Paperback: 155 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; 2nd edition (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252064836
• ISBN-13: 978-0252064838
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,426,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tony Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago and is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently the novel "The Whale Chaser" (Academy Chicago Publishers). His recent work includes the anthology "The Habit of Art" (Indiana University Press) as well as the novel "In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu" (Picador USA/St. Martin's Press) and the story collection "Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood" (University of Illinois Press). His writing has received 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 Pushcart Prize, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, among other honors.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very gifted writer, March 15, 2000

By 

David Bontumasi (Chicago Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short Fiction) (Paperback)

A engaging and enthralling collection of stories. Mr. Ardizzone is a very gifted writer who combines all elements of life, be it realistic or magical, contemporary or traditional, and it is done in an enjoyable and immediate manner. He joins the ranks and stands proud with the gifted writers and poets who hail from and write of Chicago. My hat is off to this writer and this work.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for your collection, February 2, 2003

By 

Anthony R. Buccino (Nutley, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short Fiction) (Paperback)

This book is a pleasant surprise. Skillfully done and consistently on target.

Holy Cards alone is justification for buying this book. That short story has been reprinted in Don't Tell Mama the Penguin collection of Italian American writing. Anyone who buys this book based on reading the reprint won't be disappointed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An overlooked treasure, January 11, 2008

By 

Dennis M. Rozarto - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short Fiction) (Paperback)

An excellent book. Insightful. Instructive. Nostalgic. Atmospheric. It should be on required reading lists in college literature courses. Being an Italian-American made it especially enjoyable reading. It was not easy to find, but well worth the effort. It may not have that mass appeal that results in celebrity and riches for the author but that's part of the tantalizing charm of the book and what makes it so far superior to what's promoted on TV and bestseller's lists.