by Charles Bukowski edited by Abel Debritto ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2015
Always passionate, frequently funny, occasionally incoherent excerpts from a significant 20th-century American writer.
A selection of writing on writing from the “Dirty Old Man” of American letters.
Those who know Bukowski (1920-1994) as a barfly caricature will find revelation throughout these letters to editors and to fellow writers, Henry Miller and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among them. Many will be surprised at how well-read he was and how seriously he took his art. As he complains of aggressive editing, “my writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way. I don’t want it smoothed out.” He rails against those who aspire to fame, who think that anyone can teach writing, and who adhere to the strictures of academic rules. He proclaims himself “King of the hard-mouth poets” and “the Dostoyevsky of the ’70s” and dismisses more refined poems as “bloodless butterflies” and “stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.” Bukowski’s rants are great fun to read, often illuminating and inspirational. Their chronological progression presents a kind of alternative memoir to the thinly disguised autobiography of his fiction, since the life that informs the writing keeps seeping through the selected passages. However, there is plenty of obsessive repetition here, perhaps partly because of the format of the letters, which were never meant to be read as a whole, and partly because of the nature of alcoholism. “To get through this game drinking helps a great deal,” he writes of the writing racket, “although I don’t recommend it to many. Most drunks I’ve known aren’t very interesting at all. Of course, most sober people aren’t either.” Of his foray into film collaboration with the autobiographical Barfly, he writes of his surprise that the director “wants a plot and an evolvement of character. shit, my characters seldom evolve, they are too fucked-up. they can’t even type.” Drawings and handwritten notes enhance the intimacy and vitality of the selections.
Always passionate, frequently funny, occasionally incoherent excerpts from a significant 20th-century American writer.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-239600-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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by Charles Bukowski ; edited by Abel Debritto
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by Charles Bukowski ; edited by David Stephen Calonne
by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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