May Selection:

Ask The Dust by John Fante

Next Society Meeting: Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 6:30pm

Dana Branch Public Library 3680 Atlantic Ave. Parking available in back of library and along 37th Street Refreshments will be provided

This book is another sterling recommendation from the Saltzman workshop.  The under-appreciated Fante's second outing details the adventures of his alterego, Arturo Bandini, as the struggling young writer tackles Los Angeles in  the
late 1930s. And take it from personal experience, tackling L.A. as a 
destitute young scribe some decades later isn't much different. In other words: 
Fante gets it right and sets it down in his Chianti-steak-and-potatoes style, 
with prose both simple and rich. This Black Sparrow edition has a bonus: Charles 
Bukowski's great preface on how Fante stacks up against writers that were at 
once more famous--and far more anemic.

John Fante was born in Colorado in 1909 and began writing in 1929. He 
published numerous short stories, novels and screenplays in the following  decades.
ASK THE DUST, a coming-of-age novel set in Los Angeles, was first  published
in 1939. Says Charles Bukowski, in the preface to ASK THE DUST, of his  first
encounter with Fante's work, "Then one day I pulled a book down and opened  it,
and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had 
found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled 
easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was 
followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a 
form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who 
was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a
superb  simplicity ... that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me." John
Fante died  in 1983.