The Evening News: Stories

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection is an uneven combination of daring and prosaic writing. Ardizzone is at his best when he takes a few risks, experimenting with the intertwining of past and present. ""My Father's Laugh'' is a powerful evocation of a young man's relationship with his father; the narrator comes to terms with both his father's death and a dying love affair. The title story, tooin which a couple watches the news and wonders how they can bring a child into such a terrible world, much less find a way to affirm their own love for one anothershows Ardizzone to be a self-assured writer with something to say. Many of these pieces, however, read like early, perhaps autobiographical effortsdescriptions of a boy growing up in Chicago, playing baseball, being a youthful revolutionary. In trying to depict the momentous within the mundane, Ardizzone must narrow his vision, and risk losing the reader. Otherwise, Ardizzone (Heart of the Order demonstrates a fine understanding of human vulnerability. (October)