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Charles Bukowski

post office: A Novel Paperback – February 27, 2007

by Charles Bukowski (Author)

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"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. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novel—the one that catapulted its author to national fame—is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, and Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski and his fictional alter ego, Chinaski.

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From the Publisher

At HarperCollins, authors and their work are at the center of everything we do. We are proud to provide our authors with unprecedented editorial excellence, marketing reach, long-standing connections with booksellers, and insight into reader and consumer behavior. Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, HarperCollins also uses digital technology to create unique reading experiences and expand the reach of our authors.

HarperCollins was founded by brothers James and John Harper in New York City in 1817 as J. and J. Harper, later Harper & Brothers. In 1987, as Harper & Row, it was acquired by News Corporation. The worldwide book group was formed following News Corporation's 1990 acquisition of the British publisher William Collins & Sons. Founded in 1819, William Collins & Sons published a range of Bibles, atlases, dictionaries, and reissued classics, expanding over the years to include legendary authors such as H. G. Wells, Agatha Christie, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.

The house of Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, Thackeray, Dickens, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and Margaret Wise Brown, HarperCollins has a long and rich history that reaches back to the early nineteenth century and offers our publishing team a depth of experience.

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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 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

Product details

Item Weight : 5.8 ounces
Paperback : 202 pages
ISBN-10 : 0061177571
ISBN-13 : 978-0061177576
Product Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.47 x 8 inches
Publisher : Ecco; Reprint Edition (February 27, 2007)
Language: : English

Best-sellers rank #9,945 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#27 in Dark Humor
#63 in Self-Help & Psychology Humor
#150 in Classic American Literature

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Complexity and depth and swear words

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2018

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Oh, to be Henry Chinaski. Or not. Bukowski writes about him with such a focus on the details and the soul of the man that it doesn’t seem out of place to want to be a shiftless, irascible wino for the better part of a half century. Henry is America, wanting to live a better life and do the right thing but not quite sure how to get there and then wondering where the time went.
I had always heard of Bukowski and knew that he was someone so would enjoy but had never picked up a book. Post Office showed me why I should. There is a world here, something awful and beautiful and whimsical and entirely possible. There but for the grace of God go I...
If you’ve ever lived a life where you both know that you are responsible for your life and simultaneously wondered if the universe was conspiring against you, you’ll love this. If you haven’t, you’ll still appreciate Bukowski’s character driven prose and reflections on life...not well-lived, but lived all the same.

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JustPlainBill

Weaving a disappointing life around the Post Office (and sequel to "Ham on Rye")

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2017

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This book chronicles the (fictional) later life of main character Henry Chinaski, who has for most of the book a dead-end “career” at the Post Office over 12 years. His regular spells of drudgery there are interspersed with lots of drinking, women, race track betting, and some cynically amusing commentary. Chinaski is not upbeat by any means, yet at the same time, never seems quite completely ground down by his life.

As depicted, work at the Post Office (and on at least one other job) is every bit as depersonalizing as most of us imagine. The long hours, tedium, disrespect and abuse are peppered with Chinaski’s slovenly disdain for the bureaucracy and the plodding supervisors he works for. Chinaski does not seem to want to work when he doesn’t have to, but for much of the book, seems to go along with it anyway, in part perhaps because it seems like the path of least resistance given his circumstances. On the surface, none of his work quite seems to totally shackle him, but in less obvious ways, he finally discovers that it has gradually wrung him out anyway, in spite of himself.

I read this immediately after “Ham on Rye” (by the same author, Bukowski). Although "Ham on Rye" was written later, it is about Chinaski’s early life from his time as a young boy through adolescence, and is even blunter than this one. I therefore started this book with the character from “Ham on Rye” fresh in my mind. Although Chinaski is still recognizable, one has to wonder what beat him down in between, since at the end of "Ham on Rye" I would not have said that he would be pursuing work in the way he does in this book.

Although I liked “Ham on Rye” better, this is both an excellent and an easy read. Bukowski’s style is simple, direct, blunt, and straightforward.

15 people found this helpful

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EVOCATIVE DARK COMEDY

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2017

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This is the first book I've read by Charles Bukowski though I have known about his books for years. This is an unsentimental, spare, stream-of-consciousness tale of, Hank Chinaski, a man who is slowly killing himself with booze, cigarettes and an empty, loveless life. There is nothing profound or redemptive about this man's life. He is living a life of quiet desperation working at a job he hates in order to pay bills, pay for his addictions and simply survive another day with a hangover. As I read the book, I wondered just how many people live like this. The book gives us a glimpse into a strata of life that many people know nothing about and can't imagine living in.

Bukowski's sparse, first person style makes the telling of this dark comedy seem easy while it obviously is not. Chinaski is Bukowski's alter-ego and as another reviewer said, it is sometimes hard to know where one begins and the other leaves off. I will read other books by this author who was a very prolific writer, but certainly not back-to-back. I need a little time to recover from the profound emotions evoked by this book before reading another "heavy" story.

15 people found this helpful

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As if Terry Gilliam directed a booze-fueled bureaucratic nightmare

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2016

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A delirious, repetitive, repressed and hostile bureaucratic nightmare, Post Office is a novel that takes on Bukowski's decade-plus chained to the postal system. As a compelling artist, sloppy drunk, and sexually voracious gambler, Bukowski drifts in and out of his narrative with unsentimental anger and boozy energy, an undercurrent of resentment and anger everpresent until it is contrasted clean with the interest and indulgent love for the women in his life.

The most provocative elements of this book was certainly the portions where we see the shuffling, confusing, scary catch-22 Brazil-esque burlesque of his work in the Post Office itself. Cycling in and out, over and over, unable to even quit his job, Bukowski created a labyrinthine grand guinol of paper and sorting boxes all standing in his way of his net drink, his next lay, and his ability to even write a halfway decent line of poetry. In many ways, this reflects how I personally see my own art in the world, and it is in this manner that I really connected with his character in this book. In real life, the genesis of this book and Bukowski’s career came from being offered a hundred bucks a month to quit the post office to promise to write full time by John Martin and Black Sparrow Press…and so we all wish for this little black sparrow angel to fly into our window someday.

The most beautiful element of the book was easily the portrayal of his relationship with Betty (Jane Cooney Baker). They were perfect for each other, but in the piece the sentimentality with which he approached their relationship in both tone, diction, syntax, and other practical elements isn’t mirrored by any other writing in the book or in his approach to any other woman in any of his books. It is simply this beautiful, pure, self-destructive relationship that serves as a wholly gorgeous and holy relic that he certainly held on to for the rest of his life…and it seems that the story arc with her is one of the most beautiful things that he had ever written – the only thing that he had ever cared for snatched from him just as he realized that it was the most important thing in the world to him. What destroyed her is exactly what he tried to destroy himself with, and in her death he found the death of love, the death of a healthy sexual identity, and the death of himself.

Of course, the narrative pacing and overall diction of Bukowski's narrative voice are certainly the most compelling elements of this book. There is a certain blue-collarness to his writing that offers a remarkably simple approach to what is often a much more serious and Complicated piece – but his genius lies in this very thing. Bukowski can create a story that is appropriate for all intellectual audiences and still write something that is completely different in terms of overall beauty and meaning in the English Language. This is likely why legions of writers thought they could follow in his footsteps and write when nothing could be further from the truth (and Bukowski had no problem telling them that).

An excellent, excellent, excellent book that should be required reading for all American men.

13 people found this helpful

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Fair Play

Compelling Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2018

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Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski.
In the author’s own unique style, he writes what is a semi-autobiographical account based on his own experiences working at mundane jobs with the United States Post Office.
What I found most remarkable about this short novel (162 pages) is how enjoyable the author made me feel about such an apparent mundane, ordinary world. I say “enjoyable” because it was a joy to read. I could sense the pain behind the pen. The pain was often camouflaged with hilarity, his sexual mores, heavy drinking and ventures to the racetrack. There was, it seemed, a quiet rage taking place in this author’s soul. The “mundane” was the Post Office setting. Not many, I wager, could write such a compelling book in that kind of setting.
It is an account of a so-called loser, dwelling in the lower reaches of American society in the 1960’s. Parts of the story are brutal as the main character Henry Chinaski lurches from one bad place to another. Yet, it is also tender perhaps best illustrated by the ‘second-time-around’ relationship with Betty. He notices how she has aged and realizes he has too.
I found his attitude to the pettiness of the Post Office bureaucracy hilarious both in the excellent dialogue exchanges between him and his “soups” (supervisors), and the replication of some mindless, legalese warning letters issues to him by the Post Office. It reminded me of my own “real life” when dealing with similar government institutions.
This is a unique book written in a unique style. There is also a further unique aspect. In this UK Virgin Digital edition there is an excellent foreword by Niall Griffiths. I don’t think I have ever been entertained as much by a foreword.

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Pete Cowell

Lurid Hilarity, Surprising Tenderness

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 12, 2017

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I think this was Bukowski's first novel, written, I believe, within a month or two after quitting his job at the post office where he'd worked for years. And it shows. This semi-autobiographical tale contains all the raw emotion and frustration you might expect; details of the numbing grind, the drunken oblivion, all the rough nights and the women Henry Chinaski, the antagonist, spends them with. Holding it all together is a sense that it was written in passionate desperation, and this energy is almost tangible. It's a novel about a guy trying to make it as a writer. No, it's the story of a guy trying not to get crushed by the facts of his own existence. Whatever it is, Post Office is eloquent, witty and uncompromisingly real. Try it.

6 people found this helpful

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MDReviews

Prime slice of sleazy Americana

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 16, 2019

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Bukowski doesn’t shy away from grittiness with his characters and novels. Alcoholism, self-loathing and casual sex with no holds barred is what makes his writing style so unique and cringe-inducing.

Following the antics of Henry Chinaski (semi-fictionalised incantation of himself), who’s tenure at the post office is documented in immense detail. It’s harrowing, repulsive and demands your attention. One of his best, Post Office has a warranted legacy and is worth checking out for any avid reader who has yet to find an in with Bukowski’s work.

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Brian R. Martin

Repulsive, but compelling.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2015

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‘Post Office’ is Bukowski’s first novel and sets the style for his later books. It is a semi-autobiographical story of Henry Chinaski, a low-life loser living a day-to-day existence revolving around heavy drinking, gambling at the racetrack and as much sex as he can get. His modest income is derived from uncertain work at the post office, sorting and delivering mail. The job is unrelentingly harsh and boring, but he refuses to buckle under, even when a vindictive supervisor refuses to allocate him work some days and so he is without pay. As a role model Chinaski leaves much to be desired, and is a far from attractive person, with many aspects of his character definitely repulsive. His is a ‘like-me-or-loath-me attitude’; it’s all the same to him. (Perhaps it is a foretaste of Bukowski’s own later life; when he became famous and rich he married several times and also drank heavily.) The writing is direct, sometimes raw, and often coarse, but with humour, not unlike that of Henry Miller, but is just right for the situations described. This, together with a horrified fascination, makes it difficult to give up on him. This is not a gentle read and is often unpleasant, but is well worth reading as an introduction to a unique American writer.

5 people found this helpful

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Alex

I wouldn't recommend it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 25, 2019

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The book reminded me a lot of 'On The Road' by Jack Kerouac just without the depth of characters. It's quite funny in places and thought provoking but only to a point. In short, there are, many, many books that are better. If you are at a loss for something read, go to something else.

3 people found this helpful

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W.L.

A classic I believe

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 13, 2019

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This, like Catcher in the Rye, I bought because I had heard it was a classic. I does get you into the head and a thick, alcoholic chancer. Very Distopian, but I just came out of it thinking 'why bother'. - Just not my sort of thing.

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Kindle Customer

Good read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2016

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I've always liked Bukowksi's quotes, so I thought I give one of his books a try...
This is my first read by, Charles Bukowski and after reading a few reviews on GR, thought this would be a good book to start with.
Its raw, certainty doesn't hold back and if you're easily offended, then stay away.
The book can read a tad messy, like he is actually writing in a inebriated state, but I personally think this works.
4stars for honest feel this book projects****

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Mr L McEwen

Real Life fiction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2014

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's in the first person and seems to be an auto biography of the author in his forties. I'd love to know how much is real and how much was gloss? I loved his straight forward description of his relationships with women. He lets the facts speak for themselves and gives you a great feel for the futility of his lot and how he nevertheless made a life for himself despite the lack of opportunity. He seemed to find joy and despair in a rhythmic pattern. What shines through is his acceptance of each, in equal measure.

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Omar Beggs

A book to immerse in

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2020

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It has been several years since a book has grbbed me so firmly like this one. A sharply etched reflection on instances from a life built around a monotonous work life. Do watch a protrayal of Hank (as he was known to those who knew him) on YouTube "Born into this " to give more context to the book.

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Chloe.

Great book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2020

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Ordered the book for my husband who is a new fan of Bukowski. He’s only about a 1/3 through it but is thoroughly enjoying it. Fast delivery and excellent condition.

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Amazon Customer

Good book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2020

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Bukowski is known for his rough and ready style of writing, and this book encompasses it all.

A really great book with a couple of pretty dark scenes.

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alex

Good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2019

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Interesting novel from one of the most interesting authors.

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Louis

Classic read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2018

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Typical Bukowski, if you like his other works, this is no different. For those new to the author, it may be worth understanding him first. In any case, a classic read.

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A. J. Hammond

We want more!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2015

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I got rid of my Bukowski collection and am now getting it all over again on Kindle. I prefer Post Office to Factotum and both of them to Ham on Rye, but whatever if you like Bukowski and haven't read this - read it now! There are numerous other Bukowski books not available on kindle that I would snap up if anyone cares to make them available.

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Luke

Not much inside.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2015

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Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for this type of literature, but I don't think there's anything particularly valuable or inspiring about this book. If you like reading about mistreated women, horrible jobs, sadistic superiors, primitive people or irresponsible drinking then buy it with confidence. At times it was so frustrating that it made me laugh, which is why I give it two stars instead of one.

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