Bandini is a magnificent creation and his rediscovery is not before time. Times Literary
Supplement With introductions by Charles Bukowski and John Fante One of the great outsider
figures of twentieth-century literature John Fante possessed a style of deceptive simplicity
full of emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological point. Among the novels short stories
and screenplays that comprised his career Fante's crowning accomplishments were for many his
four stories about a certain uncomplicated character from the hills of Abruzzi. Collected
together in one volume for the first time The Bandini Quartet tells of Arturo Bandini Fante's
fictional alter ego an impoverished young Italian-American who armed with only a Jesuit high
school education and the insane desire to write novels escapes his suffocating home in
Colorado to seek glory in a Depression-era Los Angeles. This edition also includes the
first-ever UK publication of Dreams From Bunker Hill the brilliant and final novel which a
blind and wheelchair- bound Fante nearing his death bed dictated to his wife Joyce. A tough
and beautifully realised tale . . . affecting powerful and poignant stuff. Time Out John Fante
knew how to make words sing. When he was on form he could write sentences that stopped time.
Uncut John Fante takes some beating . . . mean moody disturbing and intensely atmospheric.
The Times Design by James Hutcheson
