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| Unfortunately, the press that published many of Buke's books and poetry, Black Sparrow Press, folded a few years ago. You can still get most of his titles through Harper Collins owned ECCO at harpercollins.com David R. Godine Publishers, who bought the Black Sparrow collection and website doesn't seem interested in keeping Bukowski in their collection. Fuckers. However, City Lights Press, in San Francisco (They maintain one of the best collections anywere, by the way) carries a number of titles by Bukowski. |
| A good resource for links on Hank: http://www.realbeer.com/buk/links.html |
| Excerpts from "Living on Luck", By Charles Bukowski: "[To John William Corrington] January 17, 1961 Hello Mr. Corrington: Well, it helps sometimes to receive a letter such as yours. This makes two. A young man out of San Francisco wrote me that someday they would write books about me, if that would be any help. Well, I'm not looking for help, or praise either, and I'm not trying to play tough. But I had a game I used to play with myself, a game called Desert Island and while I was laying around in jail or art class or walking toward the ten dollar window at the track, I'd ask myself, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island by yourself, never to be found, except by the birds and the maggots, would you take a stick and scratch words in the sand? I had to say "no," and for a while this solved a lot of things and let me go ahead and do a lot of things I didn't want to do, and it got me away from the typewriter and it put me in the charity ward of the county hospital, the blood charging out of my ears and my mouth and my ass, and they waited for me to die but nothing happened. And when I got out I asked myself again, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island and etc.; and do you know, I guess it was because the blood had left my brain or something, I said, YES, yes, I would. I would take a stick and I would scratch words in the sand. Well, this solved a lot of things because it allowed me to go ahead and do the things, all the things I didn't want to do, and it let me have the typewriter too; and since they told me another drink would kill me, I now hold it down to 2 gallons of beer a day. But writing, of course, like marriage or snowfall or automobile tires, does not always last. You can go to bed on Wednesday night being a writer and wake up on Thursday morning being something else altogether. Or you can go to bed on Wednesday night being a plumber and wake up on Thursday morning being a writer. This is the best kind of writer. ... Most of them die, of course, because they try too hard; or, on the other hand, they get famous, and everything they write is published and they don't have to try at all. Death works a lot of avenues, and although you say you like my stuff, I want to let you know that if it turns to rot, it was not because I tried too hard or too little but because I either ran out of beer or blood. [* * *] For what it's worth, I can afford to wait: I have my stick and I have my sand." -C.B. "I think it is perfectly ok to write short short stories and think they're poems, mostly because short stories waste so many words. So we violate the so-called poem form with the non-false short story word and we violate the story form by saying a lot in the little time of the poem form." -C.B. |
| My favorite novel by Buke is Women. It is both funny and gritty. It speaks to me in a way few books have. |