Semi autobiographical tales of a slightly sexist, slightly racist self-loather hiding behind a wall of bravado and struggling to find his identity as a writer and a man born to an immigrant laborer. ( )

I had honestly never heard of Fante before stumbling across this book while looking at other stuff on Amazon. Given the low price and my love for the Charles Bukowski Reader, to which some reviewers compared this, I took the plunge and I don't regret it. Fante is not the same sort of writer as Bukowski. His writing is more "normal" -- and there is nothing in this book to match the heights of Bukowski's prose or his perhaps even better poetry. But like the Bukowski Reader, this takes works from throughout the author's career and puts them into a basically coherent story of a young Italian boy growing into a novelist and screenwriter. As with Bukowski, there is a lot of autobiography in this fiction--perhaps more so. The selection of Fante's letters included at the end of this volume fit right into the prior fictional narratives. Throughout, there is much to enjoy. The joys and miseries of being Italian and Catholic are explored at length, and though I am neither, I could still identify with the depth of feeling of the narrators. The boy's love/hate relationship with his bricklayer father is especially engrossing, but other characters and episodes stand out as well. This is a compelling, enjoyable read that will take you from the child of the 1920s to the adult of the 1970s. One potential drawback of this (and the Bukowski Reader) is that it produces such a strong beginning-middle-end story that you may feel you have it all and don't need any more. That would probably be a mistake. ( )