Charles Bukowski

The best poet in America - Jean Genet He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels - Leonard Cohen The definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark. Here is Bukowski eating walnuts and scratching his back, rolling a cigarette while listening to Brahms, showering with Linda in...

With introduction by Roddy Doyle "He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels" – Leonard Cohen Charles Bukowski is one of the greatest authors of the twentieth-century. The autobiographical Ham on Rye is widely considered his finest novel. A classic of American literature, it offers powerful insight into his youth through the prism of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, who...

A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love. A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us. Charles Bukowski was a man of intense...

New look for the classic novel with an introduction by Neeli Cherkovski. Henry Chinaski, an outcast, a loner and a hopeless drunk, drifts around America from one dead-end job to another, from one woman to another and from one bottle to the next. Uncompromising, gritty, hilarious and confessional in turn, his downward spiral is peppered with black humour. Factotum follows...

A collection of previously unpublished letters from America's cult icon on the art of writing. Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. On Writing collects Bukowski's reflections and ruminations on the craft he dedicated his life to. Piercing, unsentimental, and often...

The bestselling classic novel repackaged with an introduction by Barry Miles, author of the definitive Bukowski biography. YOU CAN TAKE THE MAN OUT OF THE GUTTER, BUT YOU CAN'T TAKE THE GUTTER OUT OF THE MAN Low life writer and alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. Now, at the age of fifty, he is living the life of a...

NEW LOOK FOR THIS TIMELESS CULT CLASSIC WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NIALL GRIFFITHS Henry Chinaski is a lowlife loser with a hand-to-mouth existence. His menial post office day job supports a life of beer, one-night stands and racetracks. Lurid, uncompromising and hilarious, Post Office is a landmark in American literature, and over 1 million copies have been sold worldwide. The...

'What will you do?' 'Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie.' 'What are you going to call it?' 'Hollywood.' 'Hollywood?' 'Yes . . .' Poetic, sharp and dangerous, Hollywood—Bukowski's fictionalisation of his experiences making the film Barfly—explores the many dark shadows to be found in the neon-soaked glare of Hollywood's limelight.

'A cat is only ITSELF, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go'. For Charles Bukowski, there was something majestic and elemental about cats. He considered them to be sentient beings, whose searing gaze could penetrate deep into our being. Cats see into us; they are on to something. An illuminating portrait of one very special writer...

In On Love, we see Charles Bukowski reckoning with the complications of love and desire. Alternating between the tough and the tender, the romantic and the gritty, Bukowski exposes the myriad faces of love in the poems collected here—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power. Whether...

Bukowski's unmistakable charisma – an ex-down-and-outer who wrote of booze and loneliness in maverick, confident free verse – made him one of the world's most popular poets long before he died in 1994. More than a decade later, death has not slowed his production. This collection, Come On In!, is selected from an archive of verse that the author left...

In 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...

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...

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...

The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best poetry from America's most iconic and imitated poet, Charles Bukowski. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extraordinary sensibility and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a lifetime of experience, from his renegade early work to never-before-collected poems penned during the final days before his death. The Pleasures...

After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," and a book of that name in 1969. More Notes of a Dirty Old Man gathers many uncollected gems from the column's 20-year run. These stories and essays haven't been seen in decades, making them a valuable...

Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski. One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate autobiographical novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels...

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. In Pulp, we find a sardonic, sometimes brutal take on the detective genre. Bukowski's narrative embraces a gritty realism contrasted with a surrealistic twist,...

From the self-illustrated, unpublished work written in 1947 to hardboiled contributions to 1980s adult magazines, The Bell Tolls for No One presents the entire range of Bukowski's talent as a short story writer, from straight-up genre stories to postmodern blurring of fact and fiction. An informative introduction by editor David Stephen Calonne provides historical context for these seemingly scandalous and...

RAW ∼ REBELLIOUS ∼ VULGAR Bukowski's take on the bildungsroman, an anti-coming-of-age story and his finest novel. Lifelong misfit Henry Chinaski grows up downtrodden, stumbling through a world he has only ever known as hostile. Fights, failed romances and humiliations abound; Chinaski toughens up as he grows up, finding solace in books and in the bottle. Savagely funny and profoundly...

With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground – people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his time... a madman, a recluse, a lover... tender,...

Everyone's favourite Dirty Old Man returns with a new volume of uncollected work. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), one of the most outrageous figures of twentieth-century American literature, was so prolific that many significant pieces never found their way into his books. Absence of the Hero contains much of his earliest fiction, unseen in decades, as well as a number of previously...