Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.

A struggling writer lodging in a seedy LA hotel, Arturo Bandini falls in love with Camilla Lopez, a elusive, unstable Mexican waitress, and they embark on a strange and strained love-hate relationship that inexorably descends into madness. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.