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In The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, Charles Bukowski considers the art of writing, and the art of living as writer.
Bringing together a variety of previously uncollected stories, columns, reviews, introductions, and interviews, Mathematics finds him approaching the dynamics of his chosen profession with cynical aplomb, deflating pretentions and tearing down idols armed with only a typewriter and a bottle of beer.
Beginning with the title piece—a serious manifesto disguised as off-handed remarks en route to the racetrack—Mathematics runs through numerous tales following the author’s adventures at poetry readings, parties, film sets, and bars, and also features an unprecedented gathering of Bukowski’s singular literary criticism.
From classic authors like Hemingway to underground legends like d.a. levy to his own stable of obscure favorites, Bukowski uses each occasion to expound on the larger issues around literary production.
The book closes with a handful of interviews in which he discusses his writing practices and his influences, making Mathematics a perfect guide to the man behind the myth and the disciplined artist behind the boozing brawler.
The method behind the madness, revealing the critical acumen of everyone’s favorite Dirty Old Man.
“Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way.”—Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.
Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992), and the following books with City Lights Publishers: Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1981), The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories (1983), Tales of Ordinary Madness (1984), Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (2008), Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays, Vol. 2: 1946-1992 (2010), More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns (2011), and The Bell Tolls for No One (2015). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.
Title: The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way
Subtitle: On Writers and Writing
Author: Charles Bukowski
Introduction by David Stephen Calonne
Edited by David Stephen Calonne
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 0872867595
ISBN-13 9780872867598
250 Pages
List Price $16.95
Publication Date 15 May 2018
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From the self-illustrated, unpublished work written in 1947 to hardboiled contributions to 1980s adult magazines, The Bells Tolls for No One presents the entire range of Bukowski’s talent as a short story writer, from straight-up genre stories to postmodern blurring of fact and fiction.
An informative introduction by editor David Stephen Calonne provides historical context for these seemingly scandalous and chaotic tales, revealing the hidden hand of the master at the top of his form.
Born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he would eventually publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose. He died of leukemia in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994.
David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books and has edited three previous collections of the uncollected work of Charles Bukowski for City Lights: Absence of the Hero, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, and More Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
The Paris Review:
“Bukowski’s The Bell Tolls for No One, recently released in a comic-book-like paperback, follows the hardboiled genre bent that reached its surreal apotheosis in his final novel, Pulp. The obvious influence is to Hemingway—see: the title—but perhaps more interestingly, the editor David Stephen Calonne notes Bukowski’s debt to the crime writer James M. Cain, who had also, unbeknownst to me, shaped the style of Camus’s The Stranger. The book includes some of Bukowski’s roughly drawn illustrations, which fall somewhere close to pornographic Ziggy or adult-themed New Yorker cartoons. One features an asthmatic customer at an adult bookstore asking the cashier to inflate his blow-up doll for him; another shows an expressionistically drawn party girl surrounded by gawking men with the caption “God, a woman could get bored.” The subject matter is a more amplified version of the usual Bukowski fare—stalwart, sleazebag protagonists; spectral, deathly women with emphatically described upper legs. As always, the most one can hope for in Bukowski’s universe is “a grim yet comfortable isolation.”—Casey Henry in The Paris Review
“He had a good wife. I remember one time they cleaned
up my face with cotton and some kind of sterilizer when
it was all smashed-in from a bad night out. They seemed
very tender and concerned and serious about my smashed-
in face, and it was a very odd feeling to me, that care.
Anyhow, the drinking got to Mick, and it gets to each
of us differently. With him, the body swelled up, doubled,
tripled in size in various places. He couldn’t zip his pants
and had to cut slits in the pant legs. His story was that they
didn’t have a bed for him in the vet’s hospital. My feeling
was that he didn’t want to go there. Anyhow, one day he
made a foolish move and tried the General Hospital.
After a couple of days he phoned me. “Jesus Christ,
they’re killing me! I’ve never seen a place like this. No doc-
tors anywhere and nurses don’t give a damn and just these
fruit orderlies running around like snobs and happy that
everybody’s sick and dying. What the fuck is this place?
They’re carrying the dead out by the dozens!”
-Charles Bukowski
Title: The Bell Tolls for No One
Author: Charles Bukowski
Edited by David Stephen Calonne
Publisher City Lights Publishers
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 0872866823
ISBN-13 9780872866829
Publication Date 14 July 2015
308 pages
Price $14.95
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Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire.
In a section called “Over the Bright and Darkened Lands,” canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. “Except Thou Ravish Me,” reimagines John Donne’s famous “Batter my heart, Three-person’d God” as told from the perspective of a victim of domestic violence.
Like Pablo Neruda, Addonizio hears “a swarm of objects that call without being answered”: hospital crash carts, lawn gnomes, Evian bottles, wind-up Christmas creches, edible panties, cracked mirrors.
Whether comic, elegiac, or ironic, the poems in Mortal Trash remind us of the beauty and absurdity of our time on earth.
From “Scrapbook”:
We believe in the one-ton rose
and the displaced toilet equally. Our blues
assume you understand
not much, and try to be alive, just as we do,
and that it may be helpful to hold the hand
of someone as lost as you.
Title: Mortal Trash
Subtitle: Poems
Author: Kim Addonizio
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published 28 June 2017
ISBN-10 0393354342
ISBN-13 9780393354348
112 pages
Paperback – $15.95
More from Kim Addonizio
Bukowski in a Sundress
Confessions from a Writing Life
by Kim Addonizio
Behold the memoir of sex-positive rebel Kim Addonizio! This book moves from gritty/funny/sexy, to emotionally raw, in swift seamless strokes.
By the end, you will feel that Kim is an old friend whom you know far too well, but who you think the world of because she’s way cooler than you are.
Bukowski in a Sundress:
Confessions from a Writing Life
by Kim Addonizio (Author)
Paperback, 2016
Biography & Memoir
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
ISBN: 9780143128465
224 pages
$26.99
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