Dan Fante knows a thing or two about surviving America. If you like your prose vodka-soaked, soulful and bleeding on the page, then Fante is your man. He has lived a life that would kill most people - acute alcoholism and drug use, poverty, divorce, suicide attempts, therapy - yet has survived to pick up the pen and tell the tale. Dan Fante isn’t some two-bit, woe-is-me tortured writer, this is the real deal. Here is a writer whose work is immediate, outlandish and as downright sick and self-obsessed as any musician, and all the better for it.