A blackout brought on by a Mad Dog binge that ended with a self-inflicted steak knife wound bought Bruno Dante another stint in the nuthouse, no different from all the rest. Now it's done, and his wife, Agnes--taking time off from her personal-trainer lover--has come to pick Bruno up and to deliver a message from the West Coast: his screenwriter father is in the hospital in a coma and is not expected to live. So Bruno heads back to Los Angeles for a fraught family reunion, where the tension and stress force him to dull the pain the only way he knows how--with alcohol. And when he wakes up naked in a stolen car with an underage hooker whose pimp has stolen his wallet, Bruno realizes the trip has just begun.

Down-and-out ex-private investigator J.D. Fiorella is trying to get back on his feet. After years of travelling from coast to coast and too many failed business ventures to count, he moves back in with his mother in the Point Doom community of California. J.D. befriends Woody at one of his AA meetings, and Woody helps him get a job selling used cars at a local dealership. Just as things start to look up for J.D., trouble hits Point Doom. When J.D.'s only friend is gruesomely murdered, J.D.'s old habits kick in and he embarks on a mission of revenge.

In Los Angeles, struggling telemarketer-writer and part-time drunk Bruno Dante is jobless again. The publication of his book of short stories has been put off indefinitely. Searching the want ads for a gig, he finds a chauffeur job. When Bruno calls the number in the ad, he discovers the boss is his former Manhattan employer David Koffman, who is opening a West Coast branch of his thriving limo service. Koffman hires Bruno as resident manager of Dav-Ko Hollywood under one condition: he must remain sober. But instant business success triggers an abrupt booze-and-blackout-soaked downward spiral for Bruno, forcing him to confront his own madness as he struggles to keep his old familiar demons from getting the best of him yet again.

In eight brutally honest short stories Dan Fante takes the traditional cab driver 'knowledge' to a deeper place fuelled by raw emotion, wine guzzling existentialism and fleetingly hopeful poetic epiphanies.

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 quartet of novels tell of Fante's fictional alter-ego Bandini, an impoverished young Italian-American escaping his suffocating home in Colorado for Depression-era Los Angeles. In the beginning, it is the triple weights of poverty, father and Church that Bandini struggles under but though the physical escape is complete, the psychological imprint continues as he comes to terms with love, desire and the knowledge his talent may not be recognised.

Dan Fante knows a thing or two about surviving America. If you like your prose vodka-soaked, soulful and bleeding on the page, then Fante is your man. He has lived a life that would kill most people - acute alcoholism and drug use, poverty, divorce, suicide attempts, therapy - yet has survived to pick up the pen and tell the tale. Dan Fante isn't some two-bit, woe-is-me tortured writer, this is the real deal. Here is a writer whose work is immediate, outlandish and as downright sick and self-obsessed as any musician, and all the better for it.

For Arturo Bandini, oldest son of Italian immigrants living in small-town Colorado during the Great Depression, the winter proves harsh. When his father seemingly abandons his family, Arturo is left to pick up the pieces, even as turmoil rages within him. With its evocative account of grinding poverty, tragic love affairs and tumultuous adolescence, this first novel from the Bandini quartet is a much-neglected masterpiece of modern American literature.

"Soaked in booze and sadness, psychotic eruptions and hilarity."-Willy Vlautin In the freewheeling, debaucherous tradition of Charles Bukowski, a taxi driver's stories from the streets of lowlife Los Angeles-with an introduction by Willy Vlautin. "Dan Fante is an authentic literary outlaw."-New York Times. Dan Fante lived the stories he wrote. His voice has the immediacy of a stranger of the next barstool, of a friend who lives on the edge. As he writes in Short Dog (the title is street slang for a half-pint of alcohol): I had been back working a cabbie gig as a result of my need for money. And insanity. Hack driver is the only occupation I know about with no boss, and because I have always performed poorly at supervised employment, I returned to the taxi business. The up side, now that I was working again, was that my own boozing was under control and I was on beer only, except for my days off. Fante was the son of famed novelist and screenwriter John Fante, but as the Los Angeles Times wrote, the younger Fante "... allows us a glimpse of the Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father's attention." These outsider stories are raw, vivid, and brutally honest. But even when the stories are fueled by anger and disgust, they are punctuated by unexpectedly funny and dark-humored vignettes. Short Dog is for readers ready for a cab ride on the wild side.

Bruno Dante has fled Los Angeles for New York City. With its cold, hard edge, it's his kind of town. . . . But the string of deadbeat temporary telemarketing gigs is getting to Bruno and the steady work he can stand is hard to come by. Bruno's trying everything: hotel night manager, window cleaner, and cab driver, all the while punctuating his unsatisfying employment experiments with meaningless affairs and intense drinking binges. Then something totally unexpected pops up and Bruno finds himself in a position to act "responsibly," to start writing again, and to get his life back on track. But like his drinking, screwing up might be a habit that's too deeply ingrained to shake.

The sixth issue of THE SAVAGE KICK features another line-up of ballsy and - at times - shocking tales from some of the leading writers in the crime and confessional genres. Headed by an exclusive excerpt from Dan Fante's 2013 release POINT DOOM, SK#6 features exclusive interviews with both Fante and Debbie Drechsler. At over 200 pages, SK#6 delivers a jolt to the gut, never shying away from dark themes in twelve punchy tales that'll stick in your memory.

Bruno Dante is the best boiler-room salesman in Los Angeles. There's only one problem: he can't keep a good thing going. When he becomes involved with a beautiful but dangerous fellow Orbit Computer Supplies employee--sexy ex-stripper, gangbanger, and crackhead Jimmi Valiente--Bruno's ready to chuck his job and his most recent twelve-step program. Leaping headfirst into an impossibly destructive love-hate relationship with the addictive Jimmi, Bruno finds it's not long at all before his world begins to spiral out of control . . . again.

As father and son, John and Dan Fante's relationship was characterized by competition, resentment, rages, and extended periods of silence. As men, both were driven to succeed but damaged by often uncontrolled drinking. As writers, both were gifted with unstoppable passion. In "Fante", Dan Fante traces his family's history from the hillsides of Italy to the immigrant neighborhoods of Colorado to Los Angeles. There, John Fante struggled to gain the literary recognition he so badly craved, and after the publication of his best known work, "Ask the Dust" (which was quickly consigned to literary oblivion), he turned to the steady paycheck of screenwriting, working to support his family and enjoy the good life of a well-paid Hollywood writer. We follow Dan through a troubled childhood to his discovery of words and life's vices, through work as a carnival barker and later as he hitchhikes to New York City, where he drives a taxi for seven years. Over time the elder Fante's rages over his perceived failure as a writer and his struggle with debilitating diabetes make him more and more miserable, until, late in life, he rekindles his true voice as a novelist. Meanwhile, Dan battles alcoholic blackouts, repeated suicide attempts and what he considers an unrelenting and murderous mind. John was a writer whose literary contributions were not recognized until the end of his life. Dan was an alcoholic saved by writing, who at the age of 45 picked up his father's old typewriter in order to ease his madness. "Fante" is the story of the evolution of a relationship between father and son who eventually found their way back to loving each other. In straightforward, unapologetic prose, Dan Fante lays bare his family's story from his point of view, with the rage and passion of a true writer, which he feels was his true inheritance and his father's greatest gift.