Breakfast of Vonnegut

Another new Bukowski Book

Fourteen years after his death, there’s yet another new book of writing by the still seemingly indestructible author Charles Bukowski. “Portions From A Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990”, published by pioneering underground publishing house and bookshop City Lights, is a valuable addition to the many titles already shelved in the “B” section of book stores and libraries world wide.
Editor David Stephen Calonne spent years unearthing obscure gems from the archives of little mimeograph magazines and alternative press weeklies like a subterranean archeologist digging for gold and fire unleashed from the battered typewriter of a determined poet battling against soft, safe writing with an arsenal of tough, true lines. For Bukowski, the combinations of letters pounded out on the keys of a borrowed manual “typer” were essential to his vitality: “Words were bullets, words were sunbeams, words cracked through doom and damnation.”