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Henry Chinaski

This series chronicles the life of a nonconformist grappling with life's absurdities and searching for meaning in a chaotic world. With raw honesty and cynical humor, it delves into the depths of the human psyche, exploring themes of addiction, fleeting relationships, and the struggle against societal norms. It offers a gritty, uncompromising look at life on the fringes, resonating with readers who appreciate authenticity and unflinching truth.

Hollywood
Post office
Ham On Rye
Women
Factotum

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    Post office

    • 160 pages
    • 6 hours of reading
    4.0(64005)Add rating

    This legendary Henry Chinaski novel is now available in a newly repackaged trade paperback edition, covering the period of the author's alter-ego from the mid-1950s to his resignation from the United States Postal Service in 1969.

    Post office
  2. 2

    Factotum

    • 205 pages
    • 8 hours of reading
    4.0(19561)Add rating

    Henry Chinaski, an outcast, a loner and a hopeless dunk, drifts around America form 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 Charles Bukowski's bestselling Post Office, his highly autobiographical first novel. Bukowski's Beat Generation writing reflects his slum upbringing, his succession of menial jobs and his experience of low life urban America. He died in 1994 and is widely acknowledged as one of the most distinctive writers of the last fifty years.

    Factotum
  3. 3

    Women

    • 304 pages
    • 11 hours of reading
    3.9(66768)Add rating

    Low life writer and alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. Now, at the age of fifty, he is living the life of a rock star, running three hundred hangovers a year and a sex life that would cripple Casanova. Women is a riotous and uncompromisingly vivid account of life on the edge.

    Women
  4. 4

    Ham On Rye

    • 336 pages
    • 12 hours of reading
    4.2(86868)Add rating

    With his fourth novel, legendary barfly Charles Bukowski follows the path of his alter ego Henry Chinaski through the high school years of acne and rejection, drinking his way through the Depression, and ends at the start of World War Two.

    Ham On Rye
  5. 5

    Hollywood

    • 288 pages
    • 11 hours of reading
    3.8(20874)Add rating

    '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.

    Hollywood