Short Dog
Cab Driver Stories from the L.A. Streets
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
“Soaked in booze and sadness, psychotic eruptions and hilarity.”—Willy Vlautin
In the freewheeling, debaucherous tradition of Charles Bukowski, a taxi driver’s stories from the streets of lowlife Los Angeles—with an introduction by Willy Vlautin. “Dan Fante is an authentic literary outlaw.”—New York Times.
Dan Fante lived the stories he wrote. His voice has the immediacy of a stranger of the next barstool, of a friend who lives on the edge. As he writes in Short Dog (the title is street slang for a half-pint of alcohol):
I had been back working a cabbie gig as a result of my need for money. And insanity.
Hack driver is the only occupation I know about with no boss, and because I have always performed poorly at supervised employment, I returned to the taxi business. The up side, now that I was working again, was that my own boozing was under control and I was on beer only, except for my days off.
Fante was the son of famed novelist and screenwriter John Fante, but as the Los Angeles Times wrote, the younger Fante “… allows us a glimpse of the Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father’s attention.”
These outsider stories are raw, vivid, and brutally honest. But even when the stories are fueled by anger and disgust, they are punctuated by unexpectedly funny and dark-humored vignettes. Short Dog is for readers ready for a cab ride on the wild side.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This shaggy, gritty collection from Fante (1944–2015) follows the travails of his alter-ego cab driver, Bruno Dante, who has appeared in such works as Chump Change. Fante add juice and color to the episodes by drawing, as Willy Vlautin notes in an introduction, from his own experiences driving a cab in Los Angeles. Bruno's cab is a "rattling Chevy"; politicians are "rectumless bureaucrats"; his wild friend Libby is "an alumnus of the Keith Richards school of beauty." There are echoes of Burroughs and Kerouac in the sordid exploits, which include dealing with a voracious python, the title character of the story "Princess"; losing a cushy daily fare because of interference by a hotel doorman Bruno calls "Wifebeater Bob"; and waking up in a movie theater next to a trans woman after a Mad Dog 20/20–fueled blackout. Hard drinking figures prominently, both as the cause of Bruno's messy personal life and as the fuel for his creative energy as a writer. Fante was also a playwright, and the longest piece, as well as the least successful, is a one-act two-hander between Fante and a slick aspiring actor he calls "Thebobby." Fante's raunchy, dynamic voice occasionally soars in this mixed bag of outrageous episodes.
