Arturo Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams. But the reality he finds is a city gripped by poverty. When he makes a small fortune from the publication of a short story, he reinvents himself, indulging in expensive clothes, fine food and downtown strip clubs. But Bandini's delusions take a worrying turn when he is drawn into a relationship with Camilla Lopez, a beautiful but troubled young woman who will be responsible for his greatest downfall. Ask the Dust is an unforgettable novel about outsiders looking in on a town built on celluloid dreams.

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante's 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work's present and future impact. The contributors to this work-writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others-analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante's masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read for aficionados of L.A. fiction and new migration literature, John Fante's "Ask the Dust": A Joining of Voices and Views is destined for landmark status as the first volume of Fante studies to reveal the novel's evolving intertextualities and intersectionalities. Contributors: Miriam Amico, Charles Bukowski, Stephen Cooper, Giovanna DiLello, John Fante, Valerio Ferme, Teresa Fiore, Daniel Gardner, Philippe Garnier, Robert Guffey, Ryan Holiday, Jan Louter, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Meagan Meylor, J'aime Morrison, Nathan Rabin, Alan Rifkin, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Danny Shain, Robert Towne, Joel Williams

"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 waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

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 excavation in an empty lot, there wasn't any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco.

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.

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante's 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work's present and future impact. The contributors to this work-writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others-analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante's masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read for aficionados of L.A. fiction and new migration literature, John Fante's "Ask the Dust": A Joining of Voices and Views is destined for landmark status as the first volume of Fante studies to reveal the novel's evolving intertextualities and intersectionalities. Contributors: Miriam Amico, Charles Bukowski, Stephen Cooper, Giovanna DiLello, John Fante, Valerio Ferme, Teresa Fiore, Daniel Gardner, Philippe Garnier, Robert Guffey, Ryan Holiday, Jan Louter, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Meagan Meylor, J'aime Morrison, Nathan Rabin, Alan Rifkin, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, Danny Shain, Robert Towne, Joel Williams

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.

Henry Molise, a fifty-year-old successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his elderly parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, bricklaying father, Nick, despite being weakened by age and alcoholism, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, ill and devoutly Catholic, still has the power both to comfort and confuse her children. Nick has been offered some well-paid work to build a smokehouse in the hills, and Henry, realising this might be the last chance they have to reconcile things, agrees to lend a hand. What he doesn't appreciate is how much this journey is going to change his view of his father. The Brotherhood of the Grape is vintage Fante, brimming with love, death, violence and religion. Writing with great passion, Fante powerfully describes the damage that family can wreak upon us all.

John Fante is a lost gem of American literature and the man who was credited by Charles Bukowski as the inspiration for him to start writing. In a life that spanned 74 years, Fante wrote several great novels, such as Ask the Dust, and numerous screenplays. He died in 1983 from diabetes-related complications. Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfil his own dreams of becoming an American sports hero. This teenage southpaw aspires to the big leagues, big recognition and big love. He struggles, though, against the reality of his Italian parents, and comes under pressure to go into the family business. Brick-laying is not for Dominic. His father, however, seeks to pre-empt the inevitable road to failure by wanting Dominic to pick up a trowel instead of a pitcher's glove. His mother's response is to pray. At once the story of class and an individual's struggle during hard times in America, 1933 was a Bad Year is a wonderful tale of childhood and its dissipation into adulthood.

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 the important next step in the reintroduction of this influential author to modern audiences. Combining excerpts from his novels and stories, as well as his never-before-published letters, this collection is the perfect primer on the work of a writer -- underappreciated in his time -- who is finally taking his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century American writers.

Henry Molise, a 50 year old, successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his aging parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, brick laying father, Nick, though weak and alcoholic, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, though ill and devout to her Catholicism, still has the power to comfort and confuse her children. This is typical of Fante's novels, it's autobiographical, and brimming with love, death, violence and religion. Writing with great passion Fante powerfully hits home the damage family can wreck upon us all.