Hambre

In 1994, Stephen Cooper, biographer of John Fante, scholar of his work and preparer of this edition, visited the writer's widow, who after many conversations allowed him to enter a secret room where manuscripts, drafts, numbers of old magazines and other papers. Among them were the eighteen writings that appear in this volume, seventeen of which had been published in magazines now defunct and had not been published since. In these rescued texts we see Arturo Bandini riding again and other copies of the endearing character. A Bandini child, adolescent and adult, with his pedantry, his literary delusions, his naive violence, his poorly digested readings and his irresistible sense of humor, somewhere between absurd and cruel. The series is completed by two sketches for an unfinished novel about Filipino immigrants and a prologue conceived for Ask the Dust, a masterful and impressive prose poem that summarizes in the key of tragedy what we read in the key of farce in the novel version.