Anagrama publishing house has released a deluxe edition that brings together stories, essays, and interviews by Charles Bukowski under the title "Stories and Essays," featuring translations by Eduardo Iriarte and a prologue by Abel Debritto.
In these pages, that drive manifests in diverse registers: early short stories, reflections on the art of writing, interviews, and essays that allow us to follow his evolution from his beginnings to the moment he became a cult figure and achieved literary stardom.
The journey is chronological and shows the consolidation of a fiercely personal style, where political incorrectness, bravado, and an unexpected tenderness coexist. There is the incendiary and wild Bukowski, but the reader also discovers an author with a solid literary and musical background, capable of thinking about literature with a brutal honesty, characteristic of someone who doesn't know—or want—to do anything but write.
"The Mathematics of Breath and Route," previously unpublished in Spanish, holds a central place in the volume by bringing together texts that function as a personal poetics: laughter against the impossible and a relentless look at life and writing, permeated by the conviction that, in the end, the only thing that matters is to keep writing.
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was considered the last "accursed" writer of North American literature. The volume compiles "Fragments from a Wine-Stained Notebook," "Absence of the Hero," and, for the first time in Spanish, "The Mathematics of Breath and Route," a collection of texts revolving around writing and the craft of the writer. Bukowski always wrote out of a vital necessity, with the urgency of someone who only finds meaning by facing the blank page.
Anagrama published his six novels—"Post Office," "Factotum," "Women," "Ham on Rye," "Hollywood," and "Pulp"—as well as numerous short story collections, autobiographical texts such as "Shakespeare Never Did This" and "Running with the Devil," and his diaries. This new deluxe edition reaffirms the relevance of a work as irreverent as it is influential.
