Ask the Dust by John Fante (80th Anniversary Edition)

Newly reissued by HarperPerennial, here is the second acclaimed novel from one of the 20th century’s greatest and most influential American writers, soon to be a major motion picture “Fante was my God.”—Charles Bukowski John Fante’s second book details the adventures of his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, a young writer in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. Struggling to succeed, Bandini falls in love with the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Yet just as fortune looms on the horizon with the publication of his first novel, everything falls apart when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears—propelling Bandini to reject the writer’s life.