The Man with Two Arms
available for purchase on Amazon.com | Reviews
The Man with Two Arms opens in a bedroom in a suburb just west of Chicago, where Henry Granville, a young high school teacher, is reading The Natural to his pregnant wife, Lori, while rubbing cocoa butter on her belly. On this evening the application of the lotion turns to love making and urges on the birth of their son, Danny.
When Danny is thirteen months old, he surprises his father with a left-handed throw, and Henry Granville's two great obsessions in life, baseball and animal behavior, swirl together as he begins to believe he has caught Danny in a window of ambidexterity. Henry sets his son on a life-long symmetry campaign that has physical and visionary implications ostensibly beyond their control.
The Man with Two Arms is more than a baseball novel. It is an exploration of friendship, marriage, and philosophy; of balance, art, and love. It is a story of the ways in which we protect, betray, forgive, love, and shape each other as we attempt to find our way through life.
How to Hold a Woman
available for purchase on Amazon.com | Reviews
In How to Hold a Woman, Lombardo again creates young characters, brothers Dex and Sammy and sister Isabel, of shimmering emotional complexity as he focuses on a marriage under pressure and the wrenching loss and grief attendant on the death of a child and a parent's affliction with Alzheimer's. Most novelists require several hundred pages to grapple with these themes, but Lombardo has honed his gifts for concision, ellipses, revealing dialogue, and poignant misdirection, thus embracing a world of hurt and healing with poetic compression. The spontaneous camaraderie among riders on a city bus, the rituals and running jokes that unite a household, the echoes of personal tragedy in random incidents of street mayhem––all snap into place as Lombardo traces a family's painful reconfiguration. A bittersweet tale of brotherhood, a sexy portrayal of embattled married love, this is a sequence of linked stories to read once ravenously, then again to fully appreciate all the nuances of feeling and perception.
- Donna Seaman
Booklist
The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories
available for purchase on Amazon.com | Reviews
The stories in "The Logic of a Rose" take place at or near Dressel's bakery in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood over a period of a few years and feature Petey Bellapani, who views the world outside of Bridgeport as "a world away." Petey sees his neighborhood as a place of wonder--a place where the excitement of a first job, the beauty of a newly poured sidewalk and a glimpse of his first love's birthmark all carry equal and profound weight. Why look outside the neighborhood when all of life's lessons can be observed up close?
Family is at the core of these stories. In the opening story, "Nickels," father knows best, especially when preaching the value of hard work. But to Petey, family extends well into the neighborhood, and even the neighborhood punk is qualified to teach lessons on bravery and loyalty. And while his immediate family plays an important role in shaping values and attitudes, Petey's generation is raised by parents who "did not send us away to summer camps or take us on high school visits. They did not protect us from the belly punches that punks threw at us from time to time." His was a world before play groups were conceived--a world where parents resisted the impulse to protect their children from every disappointment and heartbreak.
- David Schmittgen
Chicago Tribune
Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns
available for purchase from EM Press
Read A Poem for Lenard Clark
Here is the heartbreak and resilience and minutia love living in partnership with a woman, a father, a family, a neighborhood, a city and history. With deep empathy and love for the underdog and a sweet nostalgia for old Chicago, Billy Lombardo adds to the realist urban canon that has made this city's literature its name. A Sox fan, which is to say a fan of those who work hard, whose "Father's only sport was work," Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, is a lament and cry for a people who do not win often enough, because they are poor and "Live Here." Here is Chicago and a neighborhood coiled in the complexities of class, the sinister and brutal lines of segregation, a city wrapped in memory. Billy unfurls with the wonder and candor of a master storyteller, a contaballe, i think the Italians call it, though this is not a fiction. These stories reside in the belly and steel and concrete we walk on here. They sing in the wind as it whips our faces near a Great Lake, and whispers through half open windows, urging us to listen at a table near someone you love, or alone with the city you do.
- Kevin Coval
author of Everyday People
The Day of the Palindrome
An aftermath story, The Day of the Palindrome begins On October 2, 2001 (10-02-2001) when Debbie Spanfeller learns her classmate, Eddie Lovell, has sliced Debbie's name into his arm with a razor blade. Among the characters that color these pages is Debbie's best friend, Steffie Griggs ("Homeschool Steffie"), a mythically gifted "idiot whisperer." Homeschool Steffie has the ability to "fix" people by whispering to them, but when she steps in to protect Debbie from Eddie's former girlfriend, Steffie's whispered "solution" has tragic consequences.