Posts Tagged ‘Terry Gamble’

Please join us at Stanford on for a discussion of John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust at 7 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, Sept. 19, at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. It’s a hybrid event, so come virtually or in person. Registration here or below.

Something you may not have known about Fante. He was the son of Italian immigrants, born in 1909 (he died in 1983). Hence, Italy considers him one of its own. So we’re partnering with the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco for the event!

Poet Charles Bukowski (not Italian) said the book had a lifetime influence on his own writing, and that the works of Fante, a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, were “written of and from the gut and the heart.”

“One day I pulled Ask the Dust down from the library book shelf and stood for a moment, reading.  Then like a man who had found gold in a city dump, I carried the book to a table.  The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle for me….Fante became my god.” 

The book was adapted into a 2006 film starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek.

Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Novelist Terry Gamble will round out the panel. Many will remember her from the Another Look discussion of Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See in 2019.

Copies are available as in Kindle and paperback. (In a pinch, the book is even available in a less user-friendly pdf format online.)

In addition to the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, this event is co-sponsored by the Continuing Studies Program and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford.

REGISTER ON THE LINK HERE

Postscript: There’s more! Read about how Fante’s Ask the Dust turned around the life of a convict: here. What happens to a civilization that grows up alongside the constant vision of dust? Read novelist Alan Rifkin’s take on that here.

On October 30, Stanford’s Another Look book club took on Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See, a tough look at Hollywood by a film industry insider.

Photographer David Schwartz preserved the a terrific night for us – with four panelists, including David Thomson, the film critic and author who wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition we were reading.

We had another surprise guest that evening, the author’s daughter, Josephine Hayes Dean, flew out to join us for the evening. David took a photo of that, too.

From left to right above: Another Look director Robert Harrison; the author’s daughter, Josephine Dean; novelist Terry Gamble; National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, and film critic David Thomson.

If you missed the stellar event, you can join us after-the-fact with the podcast here. It really was a lively and incisive discussion about a world where talent is chewed up and discarded, where thousands come to follow a dream that so rarely and randomly gets fulfilled.

Panelists in discussion below, from left to right: Robert Harrison, Tobias Wolff, Terry Gamble, and David Thomson.

Last call! Tomorrow night we celebrate screenwriter Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See. The event will take place at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, October 30, at the Bechtel Conference Center of Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street, on the Stanford campus. As you will remember, Serra Street is now closed. Directions and parking on the are on the Another Look website here.

The narrator, a Hollywood screenwriter, rescues a young actress from suicide in the Pacific. The incident leads to an affair fueled by gin, cigarettes, and ultimately madness.

Hayes (1911-85) was also a screenwriter and television writer, as well as a novelist. The best known of his seven novels is The Girl on the Via Flaminia. He received Oscar nominations for his work on Paisà, directed by Rossellini, and Zinnemann’s Teresa. He adapted Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill musical Lost in the Stars for film. His television credits include Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.

Panelists include: Robert Harrison, author and professor of Italian literature; director of Another Look; Tobias Wolff, author and professor emeritus of English, founding director of Another Look; David Thomson, film critic and regular contributor to The New York Times, The New Republic, The Guardian, and Salon; and novelist Terry Gamble.

The event is free and open to the public. Please encourage your friends to join us! And visit our website for details: anotherlook.stanford.edu.

“Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.” 

Another Look is returning from its long summer break, launching its eighth season with Alfred Hayes‘s 1958 noir novella, My Face for the World to See. The event will take place on Wednesday, October 30, 7:30 p.m., at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall on the Stanford campus.

The narrator, a Hollywood screenwriter, rescues a young actress from suicide in the Pacific. The incident leads to an affair fueled by gin, cigarettes, and ultimately madness.

Hayes (1911-85) was also a screenwriter, television writer, as well as a novelist. He published My Face for the World to See when he was 47.

In The Los Angeles Review of Books, filmmaker Alex Harvey called the book “his most achieved portrait of male self-deception … a sharp, forensic examination of power and money…”

The discussion will be led by author Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look. Panelists include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, novelist Terry Gamble, and film critic David Thomson, who wrote the introduction for the NYRB Classics edition.