John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views (Critical Studies in Italian America) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823287858 ISBN 13: 9780823287857

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2020

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Authors

Stephen Cooper is Professor of English, California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante (Angel City Press, 2005).

Clorinda Donato is the George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach. She co-wrote The “Encyclopédie Méthodique” in Spain.

Miriam Amico was born and raised in Sicily, where she received a master’s degree in Modern Euro-American literature and languages at the University of Palermo with a thesis on John Fante. She now lives in Los Angeles working as a library assistant at the Getty Research Institute. She also conducts research on a variety of subjects, and has cowritten, with professor Clorinda Donato, the interview essay “In Her Own Words: Caterina Salemi’s Sicilian-American Journey” published in the journal VIA: Voices in Italian Americana.

Charles Bukowski one of America’s best-known writers of poetry and prose, was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 to an American soldier father and a German mother. Bukowski lived in Los Angeles for fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, in 1994, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Giovanna Di Lello journalist (L’Espresso, Il Centro) and cultural events organizer, was born in Hamilton, Canada, to an Italian emigrant family and raised in Vevey, Switzerland. She graduated with a degree in foreign languages and literature from D’Annunzio University in Pescara, and has a master’s degree in cultural economy from Tor Vergata University, Rome. In addition to working for the secretariat of the Committee for Italians Abroad in the Senate of the Republic of Italy, chaired by Senator Claudio Micheloni, she has directed many film documentaries including John Fante: Profi lo di scrittore (2003). Since its founding fourteen years ago, she has been artistic director of the annual John Fante Festival “Il dio di mio padre” in Torricella Peligna, Abruzzo, Italy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823287858
• ISBN 13: 9780823287857
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Cooper Stephen, Donato Clorinda