The Evening News: stories

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

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. 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.
— University of Georgia Press

"The short story is enjoying a remarkable renaissance, attracting young writers who are crafting tales as fine as those of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Updike and Cheever. Among the best of these young writers is Tony Ardizzone. . . Ardizzone writes a strong, spare prose that quickly sketches characters and situations, yet his work is invested with a deep humanism that compels the reader to see his characters as people—people you care about. His 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."
— The Seattle Times

"The stories in The Evening News include rich, detailed reminiscences of his family's history, memories of growing up Catholic in Chicago, moving adolescent dramas, plus ‘60s-style Nabokovian black humor and irony. . . Ardizzone mines fresh fictional veins and displays a stunning stylistic range. These stories are encouraging in the best sense of the word. Things that matter are at stake. In his willingness to take on powerful subjects, Mr. Ardizzone is almost too hot for the cooled-out ‘80s."
— The Washington Times

"Most of the eleven short stories are set in Ardizzone's native Chicago and at that in the gritty, ethnic sections of the city in whose wards the likes of Mayor Daley, Mike Royko, Terkel and Nelson Algren would be spiritually at home. . . These are tough, menacing stories in which fate and memory exercise their Hardylike sway, all narrated in a variety of inventive and accomplished voices."
  — The San Francisco Examiner

"Ardizzone's style and method of narration vary with each story, so we never feel that we're being treated with more of the same. Though deceptively simple on the surface, his stories require close attention because they ripple with understated meanings and effects that striate the surface texture. . . In short, he touches on life as he has experienced and observed it and then dives beneath the surface, but always with a kind of grace and style that marks him as a thoughtful and skilled practitioner of the art of fiction."
— Remark

"So much of what gets written about big cities concerns only the extremes—the filthy rich and the dirt poor. With few exceptions, writers routinely ignore the vast expanse of situations and characters in between. Count Tony Ardizzone, who was born and raised on Chicago's North Side, among the exceptions. His collection of eleven short stories, The Evening News, strikes at the heart of working-class and middle-class urban living."
— Chicago Tribune

"Ardizzone’s detached tone and fine eye for significant detail bring his characters and their emotions alive. Lovers of short fiction should look forward to more of his work."
— St. Petersburg Times

"Once again the editors at the University of Georgia Press have selected an impressive collection for their annual Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The ‘news’ that these eleven stories—all previously published in literary magazines—brings to us is good: another accomplished writer of short fiction has arrived with his first collection of stories. Ardizzone’s subjects are usually second-generation Italians, working class, Catholics, in Chicago. Most of his best stories are realistic yet lyrical character portrayals. They are the traditional story, a few of them done as well as such stories can be done. . . The reader rejoices in the craft, in the artistic accomplishment, but most importantly, occasionally the reader is moved in some profound way by the reading."
— Studies in Short Fiction

"This first-rate first collection of short fiction is blessed by several shining moments of epiphany in the most routine settings. . . All the stories are intensely told and skillfully written. Ardizzone has a special capacity for appreciating the values of home and family, of ethnic pride and humor, and of street smarts. These stories are worth having and knowing well."
— Chicago Magazine