The Evening News (short story collection)

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.

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.

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.

-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."