Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfil his own dreams of becoming an American sports hero. This teenage southpaw aspires to big leagues, big recognition and big love. He struggles, though, against reality of his Italian parents, and comes under pressure to go into the family business.

Possessing a style of deceptive simplicity, emotional immediacy and tremendous psychological point, among the novels, short stories and screenplays that complete his career, the author's crowning accomplishment is the Arturo Bandini tetralogy.

Henry Molise, a fifty-year-old successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his elderly parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, bricklaying father, Nick, despite being weakened by age and alcoholism, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons.

A rediscovered classic about frustrated masculinity in America's Great Depression. Introduced by Dan Fante

One of the great novels of L.A., a semi-autobiographical story of a struggling writer ('Fante was my God', Charles Bukowski)