LUSTY OLD NICK MOLISEAS ZESTY AS ZORBA, AS RUTHLESS IN HIS WAYS AS DON CORLEONE. Stonemason, Italian patriarch, at 77 his fiendish antics still outrage his family and rock San Joaquin Valley with raging, womanizing, wine-guzzling glee. After a li...
He came along, kicking the snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardb...
West of Rome's two novellas, "My Dog Stupid" and "The Orgy," fulfill the promise of their rousing titles. The latter novella opens with virtuoso description: "His name was Frank Gagliano, and he did not believe in God. He was that most singular and s...
It's not every day that a writer, almost unheard of in his lifetime, emerges twenty years after his death as a voice of his generation. But then again, there aren't many writers with such irrepressible genius as John Fante.The John Fante Reader is th...
Published here for the first time, this text presents a collection of recently-discovered stories by John Fante....
Dear Reader, if you have ever been a member of a family that has ever been "in a family way" this is your book.The narrator of this extravagant domestic comedy, who lives in Los Angeles, finds himself a home-owner and expectant father almost simultan...
I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an e...
Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams....
My first collision with fame was hardly memorable. I was a busboy at Marx's Deli. The year was 1934. The place was Third and Hill, Los Angeles. I was twenty-one years old, living in a world bounded on the west by Bunker Hill, on the east by Los Angel...
This new edition of the legendary D**o Red, first published in 1940, contains seven new stories, including "A Nun No More" and "My Father’s God."...
Possessing a style of deceptive simplicity, emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological point, among the novels, short stories and screenplays that complete his career, Fante's crowning accomplishment is the Arturo Bandini tetralogy. This quart...
Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican...
Fante's captivating letters trace his emergence from poverty to life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Complemented by many photos and interesting appendices, the book is most distinguished by Fante's letters to his mother--letters in which he is just as ...