This collection of short stories was published in 1983 and reviews say that it established Bukowski short story style and thematic range, however I was largely disappointed by the stories, as they are repetitive and sometimes boring (!). Some are pretty good, but appeared in other places like "The Death of the Father", while others are pretty absurd like "I love you Albert".
I am finishing another of his short story collections and I think I had enough of Bukowski for a while. At least of his prose. Maybe I will read some more of his poetry. Maybe I will write some imitative Bukowksi poetry. After all he is the most imitated poet in the English speaking world, so why not jump on the bandwagon. It is kind of liberating to read his narrative poetry, without any regard for stylistic figures or metrics, with line breaks wherever he felt like, and entire dialogs and conversations woven in, so it could read like a really terse and compact short story if one removed the random line breaks and formatted it in proper paragraphs. I think I am starting to like that. Screw The Bard and his fucking boring sonnets. Fuck literary rules and conventions! Just let the blood and puss and gore and grit and shit pour out as they will!
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