Betting on the Muse
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“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author
“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter
Betting on the Muse is a combination of hilarious poetry and stories. Charles Bukowski writes about the real life of a working man and all that comes with it.
One man against the world. One typewriter against the void.
- Raw and Honest Writing: Bukowski’s unmistakable voice—direct, profane, and startlingly beautiful—chronicles a life lived without a safety net.
- Working Class Life: From skid row bars and dead-end jobs to the madness of the racetrack, these pieces capture the struggles and small victories of the everyday.
- Dark Humor: Find laughter in the darkest corners of life, where a confession about pissing in an elevator becomes a commentary on the human condition.
- Poems and Short Stories: A powerful mix of Bukowski’s signature free verse poetry and his hard-hitting short fiction, all in one collection.
Charles Bukowski
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.
More by Charles Bukowski
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