Charles Bukowski's classic roman à clef, Post Office, captures the despair, drudgery, and happy dissolution of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, as he enters middle age.

Post Office is an account of Bukowski alter-ego Henry Chinaski. It covers the period of Chinaski's life from the mid-1950s to his resignation from the United States Postal Service in 1969, interrupted only by a brief hiatus during which he supported himself by gambling at horse races.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.

A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us. Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a passionate madman. Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love--its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

there is a loneliness in this world so great

that you can see it in the slow movement of

the hands of a clock.

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

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of poems from an influential writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, and acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark on modern culture.

Few writers have so brilliantly and poignantly conjured the desperation and absurdity of ordinary life as Charles Bukowski. Resonant with his powerful, perceptive voice, his visceral, hilarious, and transcendent poetry speaks to us as forcefully today as when it was written. Encompassing a wide range of subjects--from love to death and sex to writing--Bukowski's unvarnished and self-deprecating verse illuminates the deepest and most enduring concerns of the human condition while remaining sharply aware of the day to day.

With his acute eye for the ridiculous and the troubled, Bukowski speaks to the deepest longings and strangest predilections of the human experience. Gloomy yet hopeful, this is tough, unrelenting poetry touched by grace.

This is Essential Bukowski.

Acclaimed writer Charles Bukowski turns his signature eye on the world of felines. A series of essays and poems all about cats, Bukowski's classic funny and frank tone becomes, at times, even endearing as he explores and honors the majestic creatures and our relationship with them. --Bustle

Felines touched a vulnerable spot in the unfathomable soul of Charles Bukowski, the Dirty Old Man of American letters. For the writer, there was something elemental about these inscrutable creatures, whose searing gaze could penetrate deep into our beings. Bukowski considered cats to be forces of nature, elusive emissaries of beauty and love.

Funny and moving, On Cats offers Bukowski's musings on these beloved animals and their toughness and resiliency. Poignant and free of treacle, On Cats is an illuminating portrait of this one-of-a-kind artist and his unique view of the world, witnessed through his relationship with the animals he considered among his most profound teachers.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

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 Charles Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, Women, the 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum, is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Charles Bukowski's own brand of humor and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles. Pulp is essential fiction from Buk himself.

Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. The iconic tortured artist/everyman delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.

Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

In The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Charles Bukowski's gritty poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.

From iconic tortured artist/everyman Charles Bukowski, Hollywood is the fictionalization of his experience adapting his novel Barfly into a movie by the same name.

Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter-ego, is pushed to translate a semi-autobiographical book into a screenplay for John Pinchot. He reluctantly agrees, and is thrust into the otherworld called Hollywood, with its parade of eccentric and maddening characters: producers, artists, actors and actresses, film executives and journalists. In this world, the artistry of books and film is lost to the dollar, and Chinaski struggles to keep his footing in the tangle of cons that comprise movie making.

Hollywood is Dirty Old Man Bukowski at his most lucid. It overflows with curses, sex, and alcohol. And through it all, or from it all, Bukowski finds flashes of truth about the human condition.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

The Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America's most influential poet.

To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was--and remains--a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women, that spoke to his fans as real and, like the work of the Beats, even dangerous.

The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works of Bukowski's later years, edited by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, including the last of his new, never-before-published poems.

Exceptional stories that come pounding out of Bukowski's violent and depraved life. Horrible and holy, you cannot read them and ever come away the same again.

This collection of stories was once part of the 1972 City Lights classic, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. That book was later split into two volumes and republished: The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and, this book, Tales of Ordinary Madness.

With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground--people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his time, a madman, a recluse, a lover; tender, vicious; never the same.

Bukowski ... a professional disturber of the peace ... laureate of Los Angeles netherworld [writes with] crazy romantic insistence that losers are less phony than winners, and with an angry compassion for the lost.--Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Bukowski's works are extraordinarily vivid and often bitterly funny observations of people living on the very edge of oblivion. His poetry, in all its glorious simplicity, was accessible the way poetry seldom is a testament to his genius.--Nick Burton, PIF Magazine

With his characteristic raw and minimalist style, Charles Bukowski takes us on a walk through his side of town in Hot Water Music. He gives us little vignettes of depravity and lasciviousness, bite sized pieces of what is both beautiful and grotesque.

The stories in Hot Water Music dash around the worst parts of town - a motel room stinking of sick, a decrepit apartment housing a perpetually arguing couple, a bar tended by a skeleton - and depict the darkest parts of human existence. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement.

In the way he writes about sex, relationships, writing, and inebriation, Bukowski sets the bar for irreverent art - his work inhabits the basest part of the mind and the most extreme absurdity of the everyday.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses is a book of poems written by Charles Bukowski for Jane, his first love. These poems explore a more emotional side to Charles Bukowski.

South of No North is a collection of short stories written by Charles Bukowski that explore loneliness and struggles on the fringes of society.

Sharp and moving reflections and ruminations on the artistry and craft of writing from one of our most iconoclastic, riveting, and celebrated masters.

Charles Bukowski's stories, poems, and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. In this collection of correspondence--letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers--the writer shares his insights on the art of creation.

On Writing reveals an artist brutally frank about the drudgery of work and canny and uncompromising about the absurdities of life--and of art. It illuminates the hard-edged, complex humanity of a true American legend and counterculture icon--the laureate of American lowlife (Time)--who stoically recorded society's downtrodden and depraved. It exposes an artist grounded in the visceral, whose work reverberates with his central ideal: Don't try.

Piercing, poignant, and often hilarious, On Writing is filled not only with memorable lines but also with Bukowski's trademark toughness, leavened with moments of grace, pathos, and intimacy.

The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.--Leonard Cohen, songwriter

Betting on the Muse is a combination of hilarious poetry and stories. Charles Bukowski writes about the real life of a working man and all that comes with it.

A compilation of Charles Bukowski's underground articles from his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man appears here in book form. Bukowski's reasoning for self-describing himself as a 'dirty old man' rings true in this book.

People come to my door--too many of them really--and knock to tell me Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk . . . . drink half the night. A long distance operator from Newburgh, N.Y. sends me money. She wants me to give up drinking beer and to eat well. I hear from a madman who calls himself 'King Arthur' and lives on Vine Street in Hollywood and wants to help me write my column. A doctor comes to my door: 'I read your column and think I can help you. I used to be a psychiatrist.' I send him away . . .

Bukowski writes like a latter-day Celine, a wise fool talking straight from the gut about the futility and beauty of life . . . --Publishers Weekly

These disjointed stories gives us a glimpse into the brilliant and highly disturbed mind of a man who will drink anything, hump anything and say anything without the slightest tinge of embarassment, shame or remorse. It's actually pretty hard not to like the guy after reading a few of these semi-ranting short stories. --Greg Davidson, curiculummag.com

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). Other Bukowski books published by City Lights Publishers include More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and Absence of the Hero. He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.