Ham On Rye
Charles Bukowski
“Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you”
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The cult classic autobiographical coming-of-age modern classic by one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century
INTRODUCTION BY RODDY DOYLE
‘He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels’ LEONARD COHEN
Charles Bukowski is one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. The autobiographical Ham on Rye is widely considered his finest novel. A classic of American literature, it offers powerful insight into his youth through the prism of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, who grew up to be the legendary Hank Chinaski of Post Office and Factotum.
“He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels”
Leonard Cohen
See more reviews
“In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote about the people nobody wanted to be: the ugly, the selfish, the lonely, the mad”
observer
“Sometimes funny and always sad, Ham on Rye is written in an admirably hard, bare, vivid style”
times Literary Supplement
“Both powerful and, where appropriate, extremely funny”
sunday Telegraph
“Reflective, humane, tremendously evocative and absorbingly readable”
the Times
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. At the forefront of American counter-culture, his Beat Generation writing is widely celebrated. He was born in Germany in 1920 to an American soldier father and a German mother and was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Los Angeles and lived there for the majority of his life. During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books, including novels such as Factotum and Post Office. He died in 1994 shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.
