Ask the Dust : A Novel : With an Introduction by Charles Bukowski
New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Item #1496 8vo. 205 x 135 mm., [8 x 5 ¼ inches]. 166 pp. plus 24 pp. of supplemental materials expanding on the text including information about the author, letters, related reading, selected works etc. Eight black and white photographs and illustrations within the text. Publishers’ illustrated softcover wrapper. Book is As New: a seemingly unread copy. First Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition. John Fante (1909-1983) was an American novelist and screenwriter. Ask the Dust, originally published in 1939, is his best-known work and the third chronologically in his Arturo Bandini series which begins with Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), is followed by The Road to Los Angeles, which was written in 1936 but published posthumously in 1985, and concludes with Dreams of Bunker Hill (1982). The novel is semi-autobiographical and follows a young writer struggling to survive in Depression-era Los Angeles. Though it was released to mixed-reviews in the late 1930s it has since become known as a classic of modern American literature. This 2006 edition features an introduction by Charles Bukowski, which first appeared in the 1980 Black Sparrow Press edition, in which he cites Fante as a “lifetime influence on my writing.”
Price: $25.00