Please join us for a discussion of John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust on Tuesday, September 19, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center at 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. Ask the Dust is considered Fante's greatest novel, and considered by many to be the great Los Angeles novel.

Poet Charles Bukowski said the book had a lifetime influence on his own writing, and that the novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Fante's works were "written of and from the gut and the heart."

After meeting the Fante in 1979, Bukowski wrote: "There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told but I feel that he doesn't want me to tell it here. But let me say that the way of his words and the way of his way are the same: strong and good and warm."

The book was adapted into a 2006 film starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek.

Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as  a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Novelist Terry Gamble will round out the panel. Many will remember her from the Another Look discussion of  Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See in 2019. 

Register here. 

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Another Look is a seasonal book club that draws together Stanford’s top writers and scholars with distinguished figures from the Bay Area and beyond. The books selected are short masterpieces you may not have read before. 

This event is sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford, and the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco.