Kirjahaku

"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.

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.

Fiction. An emotionally captivating and masterfully linked story collection set in Morocco's gleaming imperial cities, twisting medinas, and remote Saharan outposts, THE ARAB'S OX was awarded the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, selected by Gloria Naylor. This edition marks the 25th anniversary of the book's publication.

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