Septuagenarian Stew

By Charles Bukowski

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

Septuagenarian Stew is a combination of poetry and stories written by Charles Bukowski that delve into the lives of different people on the backstreets of Los Angeles. He writes of the housewife, the bum, the gambler and the celebrity to evoke a portrait of Los Angeles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061882050

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. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

Reviews for Septuagenarian Stew

[salmondaze · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of Bukowski's worse books, featuring a high number of poems that fall flat and stories that refuse to compel. But seemingly nothing by Bukowski is utterly terrible, unlike with Ginsberg.

[mofoty_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bukoski is a trashy class act. Trashy because he writes about defecating. Classy cuz he’s honest. Act because he wrote a lot a bullshit for money. This collection, released near the end of his life, contains the usual: drinking, women, shitting, being a fucking bum. We expect this kind of material. However, in this collection, there are a lot of poems about writing (being discovered), old age, work, fame (being recognized), and horse-races. This is new stuff. While I don’t give a shit about horse races, I do care about the existential concerns of a life-long drunk and compulsive writer, who somehow, drunk or otherwise, pulled out a good line or two. He conjures some stuff. On feeling inexplicably content: “good rare feelings come at the oddest times, like now as I tell you all of this,” he writes in poem for lost dogs. In tired in the afterdusk, he writes on reflection: “this is the space between spaces, this is when the ever-war relents for just a moment, this is when you consider the inconsiderate years...”It’s all very nostalgia coated, but still funny. And like most writers/drunks, Bukoski is a mostly honest narrator; he writes about anything regardless of taboo. He does not care what you think, which continually draws us in because we know there are “golden nuggets” to be found. These qualities make up for his “ugly,” utilitarian writing that sometimes seems like “typewriting” (which he talks about often) instead of meaningful, god-inspired prose.