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In Mooch, aspiring writer and part-time drunk Bruno Dante is finally sober, and has become the best boiler-room salesman in L.A. But Dan Fante’s anti-hero can’t keep a good thing going. Leaping headfirst into an impossibly destructive love-hate relationship with the addictive ex-stripper Jimmi Valiente, Bruno finds it’s not long at all before his world begins to spiral out of control…again.With prose that seeps with brutal aggression and biting wit, Fante portrays the unavoidable self-destruction of a man whose inner demons won’t allow him to live within the limitations of society.
When he finds out his father is in a coma, aspiring writer and part-time drunk Bruno Dante, fresh from the nuthouse, must head to Los Angeles for a fraught family reunion in Dan Fante’s Chump Change. Now back in print to coincide with the publication of his new novel, 86’d, Chump Change follows Bruno through the tension and stress of facing his family—and the inevitable, pain-dulling drinking that lands him naked in a stolen car with an underage hooker whose pimp has stolen his wallet. Chump Change is “an honest misfit’s view of America far too few know.” (John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman).
"Dan Fante is an authentic literary outlaw." —New York Times From Dan Fante, son of novelist John Fante, comes an exploration of his family’s legacy—one of boozing, passion, writing, and survival. Long before his father achieved literary recognition for Ask the Dust or The Road to Los Angeles, and before Dan had conceived his novels 86’d, Chump Change, and Mooch, their difficult relationship as father and son evolved in a household where love and literary artistry were often overshadowed by emotional violence. Fante is the story of Dan’s struggle to find his own voice amidst the madness of his family’s dark inheritance, a memoir of his escape from his own vices and his eventual return to Los Angeles to embrace the man—and the calling—that once had driven him away.
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.
Now back in print to coincide with the publication of his new novel, 86’d, Dan Fante’s Spitting Off Tall Buildings is the story of aspiring writer and part-time drunk Bruno Dante, who leaves sunny Los Angeles for cold, hard New York City. Falling into a string of temporary, dead-end jobs, punctuated by meaningless affairs and intense drinking, Bruno has almost had enough when a sudden event offers him the opportunity to get his life back on track—unless screwing up, like drinking, proves a habit too difficult to shake. In prose steeped with rage and surprising humor, Fante presents a point of view of America that only the true outlaw will recognize.
"In the freewheeling, debaucherous tradition of Charles Bukowski, a taxi driver's stories from the streets of lowlife Los Angeles. 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 comes from 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 upside, 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.s"--
Poetry. In the not-so-gentle hands of Dan Fante, this book of new poetry is more akin to surgery or the body shop than to the techniques of music and painting. Fante excises whole slices of life and lays them bare for us in inspect. Pain and self-mocking humor are the writer's tools here. He pries open and exposes his heart with the kindness of a hammer or crowbar. Indeed, what could be more ego-sizing than to have all pretense flattened, laying bare the raw self underneath? "Dan Fante allows us a glimpse of the Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father's attention"--Los Angeles Times Book Review.
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.
Collects all three volumes of the Eisner Award-nominated graphic novels series, which skewers a self-important male literary poser. Living in a beat-up motel and consorting with the downtrodden as well as the mid-level literati, Fante Bukowski must overcome great obstacles ― a love interest turned rival, ghostwriting a teen celebrity's memoirs, no actual talent ― to gain the respect and adoration from critics and, more importantly, his father. Van Sciver has created a scathing, hilarious, and empathetic character study of a self-styled author determined that he's just one more poem (or drink) away from success. The book includes a foreward by novelist Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife), a facsimile reproduction of Bukowski's literary debut, 6 Poems (thought lost to time in the wake of a motel fire that destroyed the entire original print run), a "Works Cited" section, and a selection of "visual tributes" by over two dozen cartoonists including Nina Bunjevac, Simon Hanselmann, Jesse Jacobs, Ed Piskor, Leslie Stein, and others.