Growing up can mean growing pains and the joys of new independence. With maturity comes the shift from infinite possibilities to imminent realities. These thirteen stories describe the slow and subtle experience of growing up, allowing us to reflect upon the forces that pushed us toward adulthood and away from the familiar ground of youth that must be left behind if we are to learn how to soar on our own.

The Whale Chaser is the story of Vince Sansone, the eldest child and only son in a large Italian American family, who comes of age in 1960s Chicago. A constant disappointment to his embittered father - a fishmonger who shows his displeasure with his fists - Vince finds solace by falling in love. Classmate Marie Santangelo, the butcher's winsome daughter, entices him with passionate kisses and the prospect of entering her family's business. Yet he pursues Lucy Sheehan, an older girl with a ""reputation.""When Vince abruptly flees Chicago, he ends up in Tofino, a picturesque fishing town on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He finds a job gutting fish, then is hired by Tofino's most colorful dealer, Mr. Zig-Zag, and joins the thriving marijuana trade. Ultimately, through his friendship with an Ahousaht native named Ignatius George, he finds his calling as a whale guide.Set in the turbulent decades of the Vietnam War and the drug and hippie counterculture, The Whale Chaser is a powerful story about the possibility of redemption.

Set on the field of play, or maybe just its memory, these stories of the sporting life range beyond the expected to include such pursuits as yoga, billiards, horse racing, cards, and boxing. Here, even iconic sports like football, basketball, and baseball get a fresh take through stories that might feature a losing coach, a woman hoopster, or a groundskeeper (rather than a star player). Whether front-and-center as a story's driving force or as a backdrop for other concerns, the skill, cunning, and aggression on display here are familiar to all of us - as players, willing or not, in all manner of contests.

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. 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.

"The Whale Chaser" is the story of Vince Sansone, the eldest child and only son in a large Italian American family, who comes of age in 1960s Chicago. A constant disappointment to his embittered father - a fishmonger who shows his displeasure with his fists - Vince finds solace by falling in love. Classmate Marie Santangelo, the butcher's winsome daughter, entices him with passionate kisses and the prospect of entering her family's business. Yet he pursues Lucy Sheehan, an older girl with a "reputation."When Vince abruptly flees Chicago, he ends up in Tofino, a picturesque fishing town on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He finds a job gutting fish, then is hired by Tofino's most colorful dealer, Mr. Zig-Zag, and joins the thriving marijuana trade. Ultimately, through his friendship with an Ahousaht native named Ignatius George, he finds his calling as a whale guide.Set in the turbulent decades of the Vietnam War and the drug and hippie counterculture, "The Whale Chaser" is a powerful story about the possibility of redemption.

In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu is a magical, warm, and wise novel about a close-knit family's immigration from Sicily to America in the early 1900s. Wanting more for their children and grandchildren than a lifetime of servitude in the fields of a tyrannical Sicilian landlord, Papa Santuzzu and his wife, Adriana, push their seven sons and daughters, one by one, to immigrate to La Merica, a land of promise and opportunity. Here is a rich and vibrant novel about the stories families tell each other, stories that make up a deeply personal and a common history.

A troubled young Croatian woman named Dubravka travels to the site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and witnesses a miracle. Twenty years later, after working as a kitchen sister in a cloistered convent, she goes to Rome where she finds that for a few months prior to the pope's death her habit of prayer triggers miracles of sorts in others. The chapters describing their overlapping experiences in Rome alternate with the chapters presenting the story of Dubravka's life