Charles Bukowski
1) Ham on rye
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"Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther." –Los Angeles Times Book Review
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled...
2) On Drinking
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The definitive collection of works on a subject that inspired and haunted Charles Bukowski for his entire life: alcohol Charles Bukowski turns to the bottle in this revelatory collection of poetry and prose that includes some of the writer's best and most lasting work. A self-proclaimed "dirty old man," Bukowski used alcohol as muse and as fuel, a conflicted relationship responsible for some of his darkest moments as well as some of his most joyful...
3) Hollywood
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From iconic tortured artist/everyman Charles Bukowski, Hollywood is the fictionalization of his experience adapting his novel Barfly into a movie by the same name.
Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter-ego, is pushed to translate a semi-autobiographical book into a screenplay for John Pinchot. He reluctantly agrees, and is thrust into the otherworld called Hollywood, with its parade of eccentric and maddening characters: producers, artists, actors and...
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With his characteristic raw and minimalist style, Charles Bukowski takes us on a walk through his side of town in Hot Water Music. He gives us little vignettes of depravity and lasciviousness, bite sized pieces of what is both beautiful and grotesque.
The stories in Hot Water Music dash around the worst parts of town - a motel room stinking of sick, a decrepit apartment housing a perpetually arguing couple, a bar tended by a skeleton - and depict...
6) Pulp
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Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.
7) Factotum
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One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and...
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Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.
With all of Bukowski's trademark...
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"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic...
10) On Cats
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A raw and tenderly funny look at the human-cat relationship, from one of our most treasured and transgressive writers. "The cat is the beautiful devil." Felines touched a vulnerable spot in Charles Bukowski's crusty soul. For the writer, there was something majestic and elemental about these inscrutable creatures he admired, sentient beings whose searing gaze could penetrate deep into our being. Bukowski considered cats to be unique forces of nature,...
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Unmasks the tough, street-smart persona of Charles Bukowski-America's "Ultimate Outsider" Amazing letters filled with passionate, literary, and personal observation Insights into the author of Tales of Ordinary Madness, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Run with the Hunted Insights into Sheri Martinelli: the protégé of Anais Nin, an accomplished painter, and the mistress of Ezra Pound Charels Bukowski's persona as the Dirty Old Man of American Literature...
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One of the most recognizable poets of the last century, Charles Bukowski is simultaneously a common man and an icon of urban depravity. He uses strong, blunt language to describe life as he lives it, and through it all charts the mutations of morality in modern America.
Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way is a treasure trove of confessional poetry written towards then end of Bukowski's life. With the overhang of failing...
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The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, Charles Bukowski considers the art of writing, and the art of living as writer. Bringing together a variety of previously uncollected stories, columns, reviews, introductions, and interviews, this book finds him approaching the dynamics of his chosen profession with cynical aplomb, deflating pretensions and tearing down idols armed with only a typewriter and a bottle of beer. Beginning with the title piece-a...
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An account of Charles Bukowski's 1978 European trip. In 1978 Europe was new territory for Bukowski holding the secrets of his own personal ancestry and origins. En route to his birthplace in Andernach, Germany, he is trailed by celebrity-hunters and paparazzi, appears drunk on French television, blows a small fortune at a Dusseldorf racetrack and stands in a Cologne Cathedral musing about life and death.
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A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski's best unpublished and uncollected poems Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world. Many of his poems remain little known since they appeared in small magazines but were never collected, and a large number of them have yet to be published. In Storm...
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Arguably the most imitated and influential American poet of the previous half-century, Charles Bukowski remains a counter-culture icon more than a decade after his death. The Continual Condition is a collection of never-before-published poems by the inimitable Bukowski-raw, tough, odes to alcohol, women, work, and despair by a rebel author equally adept at poetry and prose. Charles Bukowski lives on in The Continual Condition, a godsend for admirers...
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A compilation of Charles Bukowski's underground articles from his column "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" appears here in book form. Bukowski's reasoning for self-describing himself as a 'dirty old man' rings true in this book. "People come to my door--too many of them really--and knock to tell me Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk . . . . drink half the night. A long distance operator from...
18) Living On Luck
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Living on Luck is a collection of letters from the 1960s mixed in with poems and drawings. The ever clever Charles Bukowski fills the pages with his rough exterior and juicy center.