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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
A perfect accompaniment to Bukowski's letters, this collection of BOTH stories and poems gives you more bang for the buck -- a whopping 402 pages of Bukowski's unique voice. He can spin you a yarn with his story or poem just like he's sitting there having a beer with you. A classic American writer who'll bet his bottom dollar on the working stiff and the tough times -- his Muses -- using the language of a true visionary. If you haven't read Bukowski, isn't it time you started?
--This text refers to the
Paperback
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From Booklist
Virtually everything Black Sparrow publishes is worthwhile, but without Bukowski, whose 40-odd books kept Black Sparrow's bread buttered right up until his death in 1994, none of the rest of it would be possible. Fortunately, "Buk" left plenty of unpublished manuscript behind that, judging from this culling from it, is of a piece with the published stuff. That is, it consists of quasi-autobiographical poems and stories. The poems' lines are only one to six words long, and the stories' sentences aren't much longer. Poems and stories relay the adventures and attitudes, at all stages of his life, of loafer and lumpen intellectual Henry Chinaski. They are occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally laughable because Henry and his women and pals are such a bunch of slobs, and occasionally as boring as Henry and company claim their lives are. And, to tell the truth, they are effortlessly, magnetically readable, especially if you are susceptible to their bargain-basement existentialist charm. Plenty are. Ray Olson
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More About the Author
Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
don't bet on this one,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Betting on the Muse (Paperback)
I have been reading Bukowski for 25 years now--and I can honestly say this is not very good here at all. Maybe 5 to 10 percent has merit and is worth reading--and the rest? Babble, gibberish, flat. Mind you, this is not easy for a Buk fan to admit--but the way it is. I bought it cheap so I don't really regret getting it. But if you're looking for great writing, great poetry you won't find it here.If you're looking for excellent Buk prose try Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (broken down into two volumes and titled something else, from City Lights) Factotum, South of No North--even Hollywood. Living On Luck worked for me as well, so did Screams From the Balcony (letter collections, etc.) As far as his poetry? As someone else stated: the early or middle stuff. Septuagenerian Stew (stories and poems) isn't very good either. Could be one reason why Martin decided to sell the store. The problem with Buk's later stuff is just this, I believe, he liked to say that writing was too easy for him, that there was nothing to it--and that what he produced was all good stuff. Well, as any writer knows, if it's that easy and you think everything you write is terrific, it very often means just the opposite. My conclusion regarding Bukowski's work is just this: a third of his output is truly great and original, a third is fair--and the rest is blatantly bad, just too awaful to have any meaning or worth reading. And yet, having said that, as terrible as it may sound to the diehard Buk fan, I maintain it is a great compliment to the man, because the third that is good will forever keep him up there at the very top of the best writers ever. So, please don't despair because not everything he wrote isn't gold--it can't be. Nobody is that good; nobody can be. Buk was human and had his limitations.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stronger than much of the other posthumous work.,
By
This review is from: Betting on the Muse (Paperback)
Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories (Black Sparrow, 1996)The general rule of thumb is that Bukowki's posthumously-published works are of lesser quality than those published during his lifetime. So far, I have come across two exceptions to this rule. One is The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, a wonderful book of journal-like observations and such. The second, in parts anyway, is Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories. Much of the poetry in the book seems as if it was written in the fifties and sixties, during the peak years of Buk's quality output (though there are some of the later "I couldn't care less what it's about" poems scattered throughout). Much of it may well have been. Some, however, bears timestamps in the work that show them as having been written early in the nineties; makes me wonder what Buk might have come up with had he lived a few more years. The final selection of poems (I divided the book up in my head while reading into sections, each bounded with short stories) is a series of meditations on death. Not Buk's normal death writing, which always had some fierce spark of hope in it, but writing that made it clear he knew he was facing his own demise. With the exception of the amazing "Last Call," which is roughly halfway through the book, this final selection is perhaps Buk's best work since Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame back in 1973. The process of "observe and write with as little translation is possible" is abandoned, and the work shows that either Buk revised these poems, or turned them over in his head a lot more before putting them down on paper. It shows. The short stories (and one short nonfiction sketch about publishing his first chapbook in 1960 that is far more optimistic) are a pretty fair reminder that despite Buk being known mostly for his poetry, he was always a strong writer of short stories-- arguably, his short stories are stronger than his poetry. Reading them is like reading Spillane, if Spillane had spent most of his life drunk in a flophouse and didn't care about the mystery aspect of what he wrote. These are quick, easily slices of life, biting with satire and rife with well-drawn characters. This is good stuff, and the first of Buk's books I've read in quite a while I would unhesitatingly recommend to those few people who have not yet encountered the writing of Charles Bukowski. ****
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great,
This review is from: Betting on the Muse (Paperback)
I have to confess i'm not a Bukowski connoiseur. I only recently discovered him so i'm not fortunate enough to place this book in any formatted context. All i can say, from the point of view of someone who hasn't read much Bukowski, i thought this was brilliant. His writing style is so incisive and simple, i love it. Filled with paradox and irony. Its worth getting. I found myself ticking off the page corners when i would come across a great poem or interesting short story. Excellent stuff
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