Reach for the Sun Vol. 3
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Literary Criticism.
Bukowski chronicles his daily routines of racetrack betting, late-night typing, and correspondence with editors such as John Martin and William Packard. The correspondence gathers unvarnished dispatches written between 1978 and 1994 from his home in San Pedro.
The collection traces his late transition from an electric typewriter to a Macintosh computer while contending with tuberculosis, cataract surgery, and leukemia. These missives also document the filming of Barfly in Los Angeles alongside candid assessments of fellow authors including Knut Hamsun and John Fante.
Reach for the Sun is the third volume of Bukowski's letters from Black Sparrow Press, selected by Seamus Cooney.
- Notes and Letters: Bukowski exchanges candid insights with fellow poet Gerald Locklin and editor Jon Cone on the realities of independent literary publishing.
- Pop Culture: The author recounts his encounters with directors and Hollywood personalities during the filming era of Barfly, including private dinners with Sean Penn.
- Creative Process: Private entries reveal his late-in-life struggle to finish his final detective novel, Pulp, composed amid the domestic quiet of nine rescued cats.
- Also by This Author: Post Office, Ham On Rye and Women.
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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