About the Author:
Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994, was the legendary Californian writer who became famous for his semi-autobiographical books about low-life America. Novels such as Factotum and Post Office made this one-time bum, and lifelong alcoholic, rich and famous, and culminated in the making of Barfly, a major Hollywood movie based on his life starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
Review:
Very funny, very sad, and despite its self-congratulatory tone, honest in most of the right places. In many ways, Bukowski may have been the perfect writer to describe post-war southern California - a land of wide, flat spaces with nothing worth seeing, so you might as well vanish into yourself. In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote about the people nobody wanted to be: the ugly, the selfish, the lonely, the mad. * * The Observer * * Sometimes funny and always sad, Ham on Rye is written in an admirably hard, bare, vivid style. It offers grim insights into the construction of masculinity and American life between the wars. Doyle's introduction is excellent. * * Times Literary Supplement * * Both powerful and, where appropriate, extremely funny. * * Sunday Telegraph * * The largely autobiographical Ham On Rye is also suprisingly reflective, humane, tremendously evocative and absorbingly readable. * * The Times * *
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