Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (Uncollected Stories/Essays 1) [Paperback]

Charles Bukowski (Author), David Calonne (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Uncollected Stories/Essays 1 | Publication Date: September 1, 2008

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), one of the most outrageous and controversial figures of twentieth-century American literature, was so prolific that many important pieces were never collected during his lifetime. Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook is a substantial selection of these wide-ranging works, most of which have been unavailable since their original appearance in underground newspapers, literary journals, and even porn magazines. Among the highlights are Bukowski’s first published short story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip”; his last short story, “The Other”; his first and last essays; and the first installment of his famous “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column.

The book contains meditations on his familiar themes (drinking, horse-racing, etc.) as well as singular discussions of such figures as Artaud, Pound, and the Rolling Stones. Other significant works include the experimental title piece; a fictionalized account of meeting his hero, John Fante (“I Meet the Master”); an unflinching review of Hemingway (“An Old Drunk Who Ran Out of Luck”); the intense, autobiographical “Dirty Old Man Confesses”; and several discussions of his aesthetics (“A Rambling Essay on Poetics and the Bleeding Life Written While Drinking a Six-Pack [Tall],” “In Defense of a Certain Type of Poetry, a Certain Type of Life, a Certain Type of Blood-Filled Creature Who Will Someday Die,” and “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way”). What is ultimately revealed is an unexpectedly learned mind behind his seemingly off hand productions.

Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook is essential reading for Bukowski fans, as well as a good introduction for new readers of this innovative, unconventional writer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...at his most lucid and powerful when he explores the process of writing ... a welcome addition to Bukowski's growing library." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook is mightily essential reading for all Bukowski fans, old and new." --Beat Scene 56 (Summer 2008)

"[Bukowski] could be generous and mean-spirited, heroic and defensive, spot-on and slanted, but he became the world-class writer he had set out to be; he has joined the permanent anti-canon or shadow-canon whose denizens had shown him the way. Today the frequent allusions to him in both popular and mainstream culture tend more to respect than mockery. If scholarship has lagged, this book would indicate that this situation is changing." --Gerald Locklin, Resources for American Literary Study

Review

"Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook is mightily essential reading for all Bukowski fans, old and new."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers; First Edition edition (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872864928
• ISBN-13: 978-0872864924
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Fanatics Only, September 8, 2008

By 

A. Woodley "A Stooge" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (Uncollected Stories/Essays 1) (Paperback)

This isn't for a beginner or a casual fan of Bukowski. If your like me though and have read everything you can by Bukowski and want more, than this is your next step. This book is a nice collection of Bukowski stories that for one reason or another haven't made mass circulation. Many of these stories are being reprented here for the first time since their appearnce in some long ago forgotten magazine. All the boozing, betting, and women you love from Bukowski are packed in along with some fascinating literary critisim (showing that their was more to Bukowski than the boozing, betting, and women). There are some lost gems in here. With that being said, it is also important to note that some of these works aren't Bukowski's best. But hell, a mediocre Bukowski story is still way above par than a good story from any other writer out there.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a gulp of fresh air, March 20, 2010

By 

Alexander Ivakhnenko (Chicago, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (Uncollected Stories/Essays 1) (Paperback)

Charles Bukowski works the form like a tangible material. Like a talented carpenter, he crafts his short story, first looking at it from inside, checking it for truth, realism and message and then he writes it and when you read it, every word fits in like a well-set mortise joint, crafted well, true, real.
Amidst incessantly cheap, dumb, stupid and shallow slew of publications this recent short story compilation by Charles Bukowski shows that there is always a true direction in life. Always was. Always is, and when you want, you will find it and will keep on following it, without living like a dull fish swallowing dry crap, fashioned like an edible meal, thrown by the society in the human fish tank.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excerpt from my Pop Matters review to run 11/10/08, October 26, 2008

By 

Rodger D. Jacobs "Carver's Dog" (Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (Uncollected Stories/Essays 1) (Paperback)

"I have created the eternal drunk image somewhere in my work," Bukowski laments in "Notes of a Dirty Old Man", "and there is a minor reality behind it. Yet, I feel that my work has said other things. But only the eternal drunk seems to come through."

In "Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook", the most important contribution to Bukowski studies to date, the image of the eternal drunk may not be exactly laid to rest but a new blood-swollen, multi-dimensional creature arises from these pages, a sensitive, tortured, "vulnerable man of genius trapped in a small room with a typewriter", a fiery provocateur for social change, a profoundly serious producer and defender of poetry, a passionate spokesman for "the defeated but still hopeful" dwelling in the lower depths of America (though he would never claim to speak for anyone but himself), an intense lover of classical music and the possessed madmen who created it, and a keen-eyed, hard-bitten naturalist essaying the hardscrabble existence of a writer ("The life of a writer is unbearable ... starving writers live worse than skid row bums") and the harsh desperation of life on the margins of Los Angeles. Charles Bukowski believed that pride "has no right in things upright and mechanical", that primal feeling trumped intellect in any race of the body or mind, and that a thousand scarlet sunsets bleeding into the Pacific Ocean were no match for a woman's beauty.

But beauty, Bukowski instructs, "would not be beautiful without flaws."