![]() ![]() Don’t get me wrong – Bukowski was a good writer and innovative with his poetry: but as I get older I find his misogyny harder to justify, especially in this collection where the scenes of abuse and rape put me off ever reading him again (and I say this as someone who, when I was younger, used to admire his writing style).īy contrast, you have Lucia Berlin, whose writing is even tighter than Bukowski’s and yet also more poetic, precise and evocative. I won’t even review The Bell Tolls for No One because, even by Bukowski’s haphazard standards, this isn’t worth reading much less writing about. And yet in terms of style, heart, intelligence and maturity there is a world of difference between them. On a superficial level there ought to be similarities: both authors were alcoholic underground writers who wrote about the low life with thinly-veiled versions of themselves as narrators. ![]() ![]() I’ve recently read two collections of short stories by authors championed by Black Sparrow Press: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin and The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski. One sentence review: the most beautifully written, moving and yet sweetly humorous collection of short stories I can remember reading. ![]()
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