The Big Hunger

About this book

Published here for the first time, this text presents a collection of recently-discovered stories by John Fante. The volume spans nearly three decades of work, gathering seventeen uncollected short stories alongside the original prologue to Ask the Dust. Fante charts the collisions of immigrant households across Colorado and California. These narratives follow hungry young writers in downtown Los Angeles, bricklayers sparring over home-brewed claret, and cannery hands in San Pedro dance halls. Across the West, the selections move from Filipino stoop-workers in the San Joaquin Valley to Denver neighborhoods, observing fathers in tailor shops and mothers guarding against debt. Unreliable Narrator: In "Prologue to Ask the Dust," Arturo Bandini writes frantic sonnets to beer-hall waitress Camilla Lopez before tracking her footsteps into the Mojave Desert. Cultural Heritage: At the Yokohama Café in Little Tokyo, dishwasher Mingo Mateo proposes to Mary Osaka just as news of the Pacific war breaks across the car radio. Family Life: Seven-year-old Dan Crane stages elaborate backyard gunfights and raids the refrigerator for cold liver to escape his mother’s endless breakfast demands. American Literature: A dockworker in a brown lumberjack attends a Wilmington dance hall, feigning professorial brilliance between cups of five-cent coffee and broken blisters. Also by This Author: Ask the Dust, Wait Until Spring, Bandini and The Road to Los Angeles.

Details

Format

Paperback

ISBN-13

9781574231205

Publisher

Ecco Press

Published

May 31, 2002

Pages

320

Weight

12 oz

Subject

Fiction