SOURCE: Kirsch, Jonathan. “Paper Weight.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 March 1985): 8.

In the following laudatory assessment, Kirsch deems The Wine of Youth “a heady distillation” of Fante's “marvelous powers of observation, his generous spirit and his enduring talent.”

“All those weeks, the things I had to say, the things I wanted to write—I could write them now, the feelings in my blood; they would mix with ink and stretch themselves across fields of white paper,” wrote John Fante in “The Dreamer,” a short story about love, redemption and the mysteries of the heart. “I rushed back to my room and sat down before my typewriter, and it flowed like magic.”

The magic that once flowed from Fante's typewriter now suffuses the pages of The Wine of Youth, an anthology of stories from the author's 1940 collection, Dago Red, as well as some of his later stories. Each of...