Short Dog: Cab Driver Stories from the L. A. Streets
Dan Fante was raised in L.A. At twenty he hitchhiked to  New York where he survived for over a decade on cheap  whiskey, wrote thousands of unpublished poems, and failed  at three suicide attempts. After getting sober, Fante returned  to Los Angeles where he published his first novel in 1996.  Today he lives in Venice, California with his tall wife Ayrin  Leigh and a 2-year-old, blue-eyed son named Michelangelo  Giovanni Fante.