STORE HOURS: Monday - Saturday: 10am - 8pm | Sunday: 10am - 8pm
“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author
“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter
The Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America’s most influential poet.
To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he struck a chord with generations of readers, writing raw, tough poetry about booze, work, and women, that spoke to his fans as “real” and, like the work of the Beats, even dangerous.
The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works of Bukowski’s later years, edited by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, including the last of his new, never-before-published poems.
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.
“This long and well-edited collection is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems.” — New York Times Book Review
