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For five decades, Charles Bukowski''s writing has depicted life on the edge with an unflinchingly mordant clarity that has earned him millions of devotees all over the world. Here is the first comprehensive collection of the best of Bukowski''s autobiographical stories, novels, and poems, and it brings into razor-sharp focus the counterculture idol''s astonishing life and work.aBukowski''s crisp, gritty, highly personal writing chronicles his spectacularly extreme life, with its mingling strings of odd jobs, unusual women, inspired debauches, matter-of-fact desperation, and literary triumphs. Run with the Hunted weaves these strings together in a manner that is as appropriate for Bukowski''s work as it is unusual for an anthology. It is arranged chronologically, not by its contents'' original publication dates but by the period in Bukowski''s life that each entry covers. As such, it transcends the realm of anthology and becomes something very like Bukowski''s memoir. Beginning with his first recollection of consciousness (as a toddler under a table in 1922) and culminating with wry septuagenarian reflections, Run with the Hunted is packed with dispassionately eloquent accounts of his hard life-from brutal childhood to reluctant stardom-and crystalline observations of life at large.
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.
Summary
The best of Bukowski's novels, stories, and poems, this collection reads like an autobiography, relating the extraordinary story of his life and offering a sometimes harrowing, invariably exhilarating reading experience. A must for this counterculture idol's legion of fans.
