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 humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.
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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
“The poet laureate of sour alleys and dark bars, of racetracks and long shots.”
— Washington PostCharles Bukowski (1920–1994) was a German-born American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambiance of his home city of Los Angeles. He published his first story at twenty-four and began writing poetry at thirty-five, publishing extensively in small literary magazines and small presses from the early 1940s through the early 1990s. The “King of the Underground,” he remained loyal to those small press editors who had first championed his work. During his life he wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, publishing over sixty books.
Christian Baskous is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. His theatrical credits include numerous roles in the New York Shakespeare Festival, Circle in the Square, the Kennedy Center, and Theater for the New City, as well as other regional theaters. His film and television work includes appearances in Glory, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Law & Order, Swan’s Crossing, and Swift Justice.