Post Office: A Novel

Charles Bukowski

Oct 2009 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this ebook

Charles Bukowski’s classic roman à clef, Post Office, captures the despair, drudgery, and happy dissolution of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, as he enters middle age.

Post Office is an account of Bukowski alter-ego Henry Chinaski. It covers the period of Chinaski’s life from the mid-1950s to his resignation from the United States Postal Service in 1969, interrupted only by a brief hiatus during which he supported himself by gambling at horse races.

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates

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

Ratings and reviews

Meh. Pedestrian account of a dreary existence. I've had similar periods in my working life working where I encountered that same miserable atmosphere and similarly miserable working stiffs. I hate to be reminded of it. For the $11.00 price tag, I could've downloaded The Count of Monte Cristo. Sorry Charles.

I read this about 2 years ago and now by coincidence I happen to be a postal carrier rookie. I can attest that little has changed at USPS since the authors time. Irrational supervisors and dingy co-workers are the norm. This book is actually as timely today as it was in 1971.

Interesting book, very flat in the tellimg but very funny nonetheless at times, and quite emgrossing. Not as depressing as it ought to be.

About the author

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.