This author captures the raw realities of life in Los Angeles, focusing on ordinary Americans and themes of writing, alcohol, and complicated relationships. His style is direct and unsparing, often drawing from personal experiences with arduous labor and social hardships. Through an extensive body of poetry and prose, he offers an unfiltered lens on the human condition.
'I wrote letters to many in those days ... it was rather my way of screaming from my cage.'The 1960's saw Charles Bukowski struggle for recognition and slowly emerge as a unique, talented and prolific poet and writer, whilst holding down a day job at the Post Office.
To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—the quintessential counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he wrote unflinchingly about booze, work, and women, in raw, street-tough poems whose truth has struck a chord with generations of readers. Edited by John Martin, the legendary publisher of Black Sparrow Press and a close friend of Bukowski's, The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works from Bukowski's long poetic career, including the last of his never-before-collected poems. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extra-ordinary and surprising sensibility, and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a rich lifetime of experiences and speak to Bukowski's "immense intelligence, the caring heart that saw through the sham of our pretenses and had pity on our human condition" (The New York Quarterly). The Pleasures of the Damned is an astonishing poetic treasure trove, essential reading for both longtime fans and those just discovering this unique and legendary American voice.
These letters provide insight into Bukowski's daily life, from his early job at the Post Office while pursuing poetry, through his transition to full-time writing, to his eventual success and recognition.
Play the Piano introduces Charles Bukowski's poetry from the 1970s. He leads a life full of gambling and booze but also finds love. These poems are full of lechery and romance as he struggles to mature.
This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 70s to the 1990s.
Poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.
These 189 posthumously published new poems take us deeper into the raw, wild vein of Bukowski's that extends from the early 1980s up to the time of his death in 1994.
In the literary pantheon, Charles Bukowski remains a counterculture luminary. A hard-drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he has struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women in an authentic voice that is, like the work of the Beats, iconoclastic and even dangerous. Edited by his longtime publisher, John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press, and now in paperback, The Continual Condition includes more of this legend’s never-before-collected poems.
Screams from the Balcony is a collection of letters chronicling Charles Bukowski's life as he tries to get published and work at a postal office, all while drinking and gambling.
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.
