Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground


Book Description

This critical study of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublished Bukowski work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.




Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground


Book Description

This critical study of the literary magazines, underground newspapers, and small press publications that had an impact on Charles Bukowski's early career, draws on archives, privately held unpublished Bukowski work, and interviews to shed new light on the ways in which Bukowski became an icon in the alternative literary scene in the 1960s.




Run With The Hunted


Book Description

The best of Bukowski's novels, stories, and poems, this collection reads like an autobiography, relating the extraordinary story of his life and offering a sometimes harrowing, invariably exhilarating reading experience. A must for this counterculture idol's legion of fans.




sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way


Book Description

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 health and waning fame, he reflects on his travels, his gambling and drinking, working, not working, sex and love, eating, cats, and more. Sifting Through is Bukowski at his most meditative – published posthumously, it’s completely non-performative, and gets to the heart of Bukowski’s lifelong pursuit of natural language and raw honesty. We recommend you read this as Bukowski wrote: by sifting through the madness for what hits you as the word, the line, the way.




Charles Bukowski Fiction Collection


Book Description

“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 A collection of five of Charles Bukowski’s most popular works, including: Pulp: Opening with Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humor. Barfly: The screenplay of the 1987 movie. Ham on Rye: Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. Post Office: "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. Women: After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life.




Hot Water Music


Book Description

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 the darkest parts of human existence. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement. In the way he writes about sex, relationships, writing, and inebriation, Bukowski sets the bar for irreverent art – his work inhabits the basest part of the mind and the most extreme absurdity of the everyday.




What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire


Book Description

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author “He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is the second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski that takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 1970s to the 1990s.




Ham On Rye


Book Description

“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 high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.




Shakespeare Never Did This


Book Description

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.




Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. There are many books about Charles Bukowski, but none like this one. Linda King's LOVING & HATING CHARLES BUKOWSKI looks at Bukowski from the other side of the mirror. It is raw, it is raucous, it is a no-holds- barred account of their five-year, on- again off-again relationship, a relationship so intense and passionate, so deep and so tender, that it makes your heart ache to watch it flame up and then flame out. This is not a scholarly examination of Bukowski but it deepens and enriches our understanding of the man and his world, written from the heart with love. It is funny, it is tragic, it is exuberant, it is heartbreaking, it is an important addition to our knowledge not only of the poet laueate of the underclass, but of the whole underground literary scene in LA and elsewhere in the 1970s, told from the perspective of a strong, liberated woman, an artist in her own right, who gave as good as she got.