Bukowsi takes off his mask in a new book

“Writing is the best job and the only job, and it’s a job that stimulates your capacity to live, and your capacity to live rewards you with your capacity to create. The one feeds the other; it’s all very magical.” Yes, the author of these lines, Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), wasn’t someone interested only in sex, alcohol, and horse racing. Writing was his ultimate goal, regardless of how he disguised it in his own books.

Bukowski's recent publication, Stories and Essays (Anagrama), brings to light this part of his literary life without, of course, avoiding talking about sex, alcohol, or the most diverse obscenities. And betting at the racetrack, of course. The book, in fact, brings together three works compiled years after the author's death: Fragments of a Wine-Stained Notebook , Absence of the Hero , and The Mathematics of Breath and the Route . The latter is completely unpublished in Spanish, and in addition to the essay that gives it its title—a sort of manifesto that we could in some way call his poetics—it adds stories, prologues, reviews, and a few interviews. The first two had already been published independently by Anagrama, and they also draw on scattered material that the author of The Fucking Machine had published between 1944 and 1993, mostly in magazines of all kinds, whether literary, underground, or even pornographic like Hustler .

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For Bukowski scholar Abel Debritto, author of the prologue and editor of other works, "they complement each other completely, because they combine some stories with reflections on his own literature and that of others." But what's more, "it demonstrates quite clearly that he was more cultured than is often thought and had a wealth of literary experience, even though he liked to hide it." The book includes passages dedicated to Antonin Artaud and other authors he admired, such as Hemingway, Pound, Céline, Li Po, and Dostoevsky, but "he also dedicated poems to Carson McCullers and other lesser-known authors."

Anagrama brings together three books on writing in 'Stories and Essays', one of which has never been published in Spanish.

“The word was his driving force, his vehicle. He had 'the writing bug,' as I titled a book of his that compiles his letters about creation,” DeBritto continues. “For him, the best thing in life was the creative act, and everything that came afterward—dealing with publishers, corrections, or interviews—was secondary. He loved writing, period; he wasn't overly interested in anything else. That's why he wrote every day, and when you're so prolific, you don't have much time to revise what you'd written. He wrote nonstop, from his youth until his death.” Because of the same low importance he attached to the finished text, for years he sent stories and poems to magazines, of which he didn't have a copy, and many were lost.

He was a graphomaniac: “He wrote around 5,000 poems, around 1,000 stories, six novels and thousands of letters, although it’s true that not everything is good, obviously, because when you’re drunk there comes a time when the quality plummets, but with the first few beers I was in a state of grace,” he assures, and also establishes differences between verse and prose, because “he called himself a literary whore, especially in the seventies he insisted that he wrote stories to pay the rent. But of course, poetry doesn’t sell as well, and the proof is that it arrived here later and little by little, Visor has been publishing it for years, while fiction, in Anagrama, became a bestseller and has been reissued.” In Catalan, until relatively recently only the stories from La màquina de cardar (republished by LaButxaca in 2015) were available, although in recent years his first novel, Correus (Quid Pro Quo, 2021), and two poetry anthologies, almost simultaneous, in 2023 , have also been translated.

His books aren't out of print, neither in Spanish nor any of the 57 he published in English, because they continue to sell, which means his readers are renewed: "Many young people are attracted to the taboo, all this obscenity, perversions, being high all day, and many others connect with his rebellious spirit and anti-establishment ideas, but that's not all there is." "He himself said that his poetry was the closest thing to his voice, distinct from the caricature that often surrounds his prose, which he often sought to provoke. But just as there is explicit sex in his stories and some of his poetry, there is also a certain semi-philosophical tone in his poems," Debritto insists.

In Stories and Essays , Bukowski speaks of himself in his own literary voice, as DeBritto concludes: “It was necessary to show all his faces, not just the wild and obscene one, but a more complete image.”