Charles Bukowski

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

A Novel

Ham on Rye

Elina Berzina

Kat Albanese

I sat there trying to think of an answer. I couldn't. I said, "No, I wasn't there."

She smiled. "That makes it all the more remarkable.”

I got up and walked out. I began my walk home. So, that's what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That's what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.

Wagner always wore a grey sweatshirt and grey sweatpants. He had a little pot belly. Something was continually bothering him.

His only advantage was his age. He would try to bluff us but that was working less and less. There was always somebody pushing me who had no right to push. Wagner and my father. My father and Wagner. What did they want? Why was I in their way?

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