Author: Charles Bukowski Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061970018 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 411
Book Description
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.
Author: David Lipsky Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0307592448 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 354
Book Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING JASON SEGAL AND JESSE EISENBERG, DIRECTED BY JAMES PONSOLDT An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.” Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church. A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace. "If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious." —David Foster Wallace
Author: Charles Bukowski Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061844047 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
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
Author: Charles Bukowski Publisher: City Lights Books ISBN: 0872865436 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
"He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It's a full house--read 'em and weep."--Tom Waits After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski suddenly found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," and a book of that name in 1969. He continued writing this column, in one form or another, through the mid-1980s. More Notes of a Dirty Old Man gathers many uncollected gems from the column's twenty-year run. Drawn from ephemeral underground publications, these stories and essays haven't been seen in decades, making More a valuable addition to Bukowski's oeuvre. Filled with his usual obsessions--sex, booze, gambling--More features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured, violent relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry reading circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly veiled autobiography to purely fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters, climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers, "My Friend the Gambler," based on his experiences making the movie Barfly. From his lowly days at the post office through his later literary fame, More follows the entire arc of Bukowski's colorful career. Edited by Bukowski scholar David Stephen Calonne, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man features an afterword outlining the history of the column and its effect on the author's creative development. Born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, Charles Bukowski came to California at age three and spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994.
Author: Howard Sounes Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic ISBN: 0802199305 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
“A lively portrait of American literature’s ‘Dirty Old Man’.” —Library Journal A former postman and long-term alcoholic who did not become a full-time writer until middle age, Charles Bukowski was the author of autobiographical novels that captured the low life—including Post Office, Factotum, and Women—and made him a literary celebrity, with a major Hollywood film (Barfly) based on his life. Drawing on new interviews with virtually all of Bukowski’s friends, family, and many lovers; unprecedented access to his private letters and unpublished writing; and commentary from Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, R. Crumb, and Harry Dean Stanton, Howard Sounes has uncovered the extraordinary true story of the Dirty Old Man of American literature. Illustrated with drawings by Bukowski and over sixty photographs, Charles Bukowski is a must for Bukowski devotees and new readers alike. “Bukowski is one of those writers people remember more for the legend than for the work . . . but, as Howard Sounes shows in this exhaustively researched biography, it wasn’t the whole story.” —Los Angeles Times “Engaging . . . Adroit . . . revealing.” —The New York Times Book Review “A must-read for anybody who is a fan of Bukowski’s writing.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Author: Leonard Gardner Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590178939 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring -- the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger - their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Ernie into the company of men and luring Tully back into training. In a dispassionate and composed voice, Gardner narrates their swings of fortune, and the plodding optimism of their manager Ruben Luna, as he watches the most promising boys one by one succumb to some undefined weakness; still, "There was always someone who wanted to fight."
Author: Jeff Burkhart Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781478392224 Category : Bartenders Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"Shaken not stirred," we have all heard the saying. It is part of what makes Ian Fleming's super spy James Bond so super. It is not the fact that he drinks martinis, it is how he drinks them that matters. Cocktails are about style and in today's complicated world of drink many of us need a lifestyle guide. 20 Years Behind Bars is that guide; part trade manual and part psychological introspective, it combines real life observations (by a real life bartender) with facts and information in an amusing and irreverent fashion. Take one part Mr. Boston's bartending guide, one part Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, a dash of Steve Dublanica's Waiter Rant, combine and you have the pure entertainment that is 20 Years Behind Bars.
Author: Charles Bukowski Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061851914 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
“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.
Author: Charles Bukowski Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062386905 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 1027
Book Description
“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 A collection of five of Charles Bukowski’s most popular works, including: Pulp: Opening with Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humor. Barfly: The screenplay of the 1987 movie. Ham on Rye: Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. Post Office: "It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. Women: After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life.
Author: Charles Bukowski
Author: David Lipsky
Author: Charles Bukowski
Author: Charles Bukowski
Author: Howard Sounes
Author: Leonard Gardner
Author: Jeff Burkhart
Author: Charles Bukowski
Author: Charles Bukowski
Author: Neeli Cherkovski