John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views

Description:

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

Brief description: J'aime Morrison is a professor in the Department of Theatre at California State University Northridge where she teaches theatre movement and creates interdisciplinary performances. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Lisbon, Portugal, in theatre movement. Her dance-theatre work and choreography have been performed in Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai, Dublin, Belfast, and Lisbon. She is currently working on a new dancetheatre piece titled, When at Last. . ., inspired by Ionesco's The Chairs.

Review Quotes: A decisive contribution to the critical understanding and (re)assessment of John Fante's Ask the Dust, a novel that, while appreciated by many, has never really made it into the canon. These essays effectively demonstrate the theoretical and thematic currency of the novel for today's critics and scholars, promising to become a landmark in the landscape of Fante scholarship.---Donatella Izzo, Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale"