The world’s bleakest romantic comedy"—Los Angeles Times
"An exuberant, extravagant chronicle of gestation which romps through to the final production of the Fante's firstborn in high Italianate style and immerses a succession of hair-raising to breast-beating sequences in tears — and Chianti."—Kirkus
"The universe of John Fante’s fiction is so immediately moving, so poetically vivid, that it is hard to decide which is the greater quandary: that it went so long unrecognized, or that in the factitious worlds of publishing and Hollywood it is receiving such enormous recognition today."—Boston Review
"Fante’s disturbing, singular writing stands absolutely alone among American Depression and mid-century writers. He was always the equal, and often the better, of his recognized contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, West, Schulberg."—Neil Gordon
"Charming and hilarious"—Salon
"Fante was my god"—Charles Bukowski
"Fante's best writing ... astonishingly wide-ranging and compressed"—London Review of Books