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Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. At the forefront of American counter-culture, his Beat Generation writing is widely celebrated. He was born in Germany in 1920 to an American soldier father and a German mother and was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Los Angeles and lived there for the majority of his life.
During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books, including novels such as Factotum, Post Office and Ham on Rye. He died in 1994 shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.
BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
Post Office (1971)
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
South of No North (1973)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955–1973 (1974)
Factotum (1975)
Love is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974–1977 (1977)
Women (1978)
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
Shakespeare Never Did This (1979)
Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)
Ham on Rye (1982)
Bring Me Your Love (1983)
Hot Water Music (1983)
There’s No Business (1984)
War All the Time: Poems 1981–1984 (1984)
You Get So Alone at Times that It Just Makes Sense (1986)
The Movie: ‘Barfly’ (1987)
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966 (1988)
Hollywood (1989)
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems (1990)
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970 (1993)
Pulp (1994)
Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s–1970s, Volume 2 (1995) Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories (1996)
Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (1997)
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998)
Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978–1994 (1999)
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire: New Poems (1999)
Open All Night: New Poems (2000)
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001)
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli, 1960–1967 (2001)
Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems (2003)
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems (2004)
Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005)
Come On In! (2006)
The People Look Like Flowers at Last (2007)
The Pleasures of the Damned (2007)
The Continual Condition (2009)
On Writing (2015)
On Cats (2015)
On Love (2016)
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Published in the USA in 2018 by City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133, USA
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2018 by The Estate of Charles Bukowski
Introduction copyright © 2018 by David Calonne
Design by Linda Ronan
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 443 4
eISBN 978 1 78689 444 1
CONTENTS
Charles Bukowski on Writers and Writing
Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way
Dialogue: Dead Man on the Fence
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Can’t you keep those motherfuckers quiet?”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“You may not believe it”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I was put in touch with them”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I swung three deep out of Vacantsville”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Tony Kinnard was a great poet of the ’50s”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“They’d been married 32 years”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“We walked in”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I’m not in the mood for an immortal column today”)