We love getting a famous or successful author’s perspective on another famous and successful author. Charles Bukowski, one of our favorite authors, once wrote an introduction to Ask The Dust, a novel by John Fante, who is another of our favorite authors. He talks about wandering through the LA Public Library for hours, days, months, just a young struggling writer trying to find inspiration, finding nothing but dull words. But then he comes across Fante, “like a man who had found gold in the city dump.” Bukowski writes,

“The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity.  The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.

“I had a library card. I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it, and I knew long before I had finished that here was a man who had evolved a distinct way of writing. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante.”

Read more: http://bukowskiquotes.com/2013/07/charles-bukowski-john-fante-ask-the-dust/#ixzz4Sl8jBu1V