Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is post-Beat, a perceptive and careful minimalist who comprehends and masters the range from quiet romanticism to soul-scarring cynicism, from farcical despair to sweet appreciations of cats and birds.
From day one of opening Whistlestop in 1985 I have sold Charles Bukowski, and I have guided many young people into the dark and treacherous waters of his poetry and fiction. He is not warm and fuzzy, not heroic, not your intellectual soulmate, often not even likable -- but, then, what business of yours is liking or not liking an artist? He had a stubborn core of humanity, a fear of other people that he hedged with a thorny persona, an honesty of language, and a careful capacity of friendship. He was a singular artist who survived his own vulnerabilities and the peculiar world he was born in.
In the store’s layout I have given Mr. Bukowski a shelf of his own in the North Room. It enabled me to consolidate his various forms of writing — poetry, fiction, and essays, along with biographical books.
On Love
On Love
A companion to On Writing and On Cats A raw and tender poetry collection 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. In On Love, we see Bukowski reckoning with the complications and exaltations of love, lust, and desire. 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.
Bukowski is brilliant on love often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, he writes, as the same cat crouches.
Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.