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More About This Book

Overview

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novel—the one that catapulted its author to national fame—is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, and Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski and his fictional alter ego, Chinaski.

Editorial Reviews

Gale Research
"Bukowski's loser's string of anecdotes, convulsively funny and also sad, is unflagging entertainment but in the end doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts, somehow missing the novelist's alchemy," asserts a Times Literary Supplement contributor. But Valentine Cunningham, also writing in the Times Literary Supplement, sees the novel as a success: "Pressed in by Post Office bureaucrats, their mean-minded regulations and their heaps of paperwork, the misfit [Chinaski] looks frequently like an angel of light. His refusal to play respectability ball with the cajoling, abusive, never-take-no-for-an- answer loops who own the mailboxes he attends ... can make even this ribald mess of a wretch seem a shining haven of sanity in the prevailing Los Angeles grimnesses."

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780876850862
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 5/28/2002
  • Pages: 200
  • Sales rank: 59,877
  • Product dimensions: 5.87 (w) x 8.93 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Charles Bukowski
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 Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Biography

During the course of his long, prolific literary career, Charles Bukowski was known as a poet, novelist, short story writer, and journalist. But it is as a cult figure, an "honorary beat" who chronicled his notorious lifestyle in raw, unflinching poetry and prose, that he is best remembered. Born in the aftermath of World War I to a German mother and an American serviceman of German descent, he was brought to the U.S. at the age of three and raised in Los Angeles. By all accounts, his childhood was lonely and unhappy: His father beat him regularly, and he suffered from debilitating shyness and a severely disfiguring case of acne. By his own admission, he underwent a brief flirtation with the far right, associating as a teenager with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. After high school, he attended Los Angeles City College for two years, studying art, literature, and journalism before dropping out.

Although two of his stories were published in small literary magazines while he was still in his early 20s, Bukowski became discouraged by his lack of immediate success and gave up writing for ten years. During this time he drifted around the country, working odd jobs; fraternizing with bums, hustlers, and whores; and drinking so excessively that he nearly died of a bleeding ulcer.

In the late 1950s, Bukowski returned to writing, churning out copious amounts of poetry and prose while supporting himself with mind-numbing clerical work in the post office. Encouraged and mentored by Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin, he finally quit his job in 1969 to concentrate on writing full time. In 1985, he married his longtime girlfriend Linda Lee Beighle. Together they moved to San Pedro, California, where Bukowski began to live a saner, more stable existence. He continued writing until his death from leukemia in 1994, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Bukowski mined his notorious lifestyle for an oeuvre that was largely autobiographical. In literally thousands of poems, he celebrated the skid row drunks and derelicts of his misspent youth; and, between 1971 and 1989, he penned five novels (Post Office, Factotum, Women, Ham on Rye, and Hollywood) featuring Henry Chinaski, an alcoholic, womanizing, misanthrope he identified as his literary alter ego. (He also wrote the autobiographical screenplay for the 1987 film Barfly, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.) Yet, for all the shock value of his graphic language and violent, unlovely images, Bukowski's writing retains a startling lyricism. Today, years after his death, he remains one of the 20th century's most influential and widely imitated writers.

    1. Date of Birth:
      August 16, 1920
    2. Place of Birth:
      Andernach, Germany
    1. Date of Death:
      March 9, 1994
    2. Place of Death:
      San Pedro, California
    1. Education:
      Los Angeles City College, 2 years

Read an Excerpt

post office

A Novel
By Charles Bukowski

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 Charles Bukowski
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061177576

Chapter One

It began as a mistake.

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or two and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you'd go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots.

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn't care.

She talked and talked and talked. Then it came out. Her husband was an officer on an island far away and she got lonely, you know, and lived in this little house in back all by herself.

"What little house?" I asked.

She wrote the address on a piece of paper.

"I'm lonely too," I said, "I'll come by and we'll talk tonight."

I was shacked but the shackjob was gone halfthe time, off somewhere, and I was lonely all right. I was lonely for that big ass standing beside me.

"All right," she said, "see you tonight."

She was a good one all right, she was a good lay but like all lays after the third or fourth night I began to lose interest and didn't go back.

But I couldn't help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.

Chapter Two

So I took the exam, passed it, took the physical, passed it, and there I was -- a substitute mail carrier. It began easy. I was sent to West Avon Station and it was just like Christmas except I didn't get laid. Every day I expected to get laid but I didn't. But the soup was easy and I strolled around doing a block here and there. I didn't even have a uniform, just a cap. I wore my regular clothes. The way my shackjob Betty and I drank there was hardly money for clothes.

Then I was transferred to Oakford Station.

The soup was a bullneck named Jonstone. Help was needed there and I understood why. Jonstone liked to wear dark-red shirts -- that meant danger and blood. There were seven subs -- Tom Moto, Nick Pelligrini, Herman Stratford, Rosey Anderson, Bobby Hansen, Harold Wiley and me, Henry Chinaski. Reporting time was 5 a.m. and I was the only drunk there. I always drank until past midnight, and there we'd sit, at 5 a.m., waiting to get on the clock, waiting for some regular to call in sick. The regulars usually called in sick when it rained or during a heatwave or the day after a holiday when the mail load was doubled.

There were 40 or 50 different routes, maybe more, each case was different, you were never able to learn any of them, you had to get your mail up and ready before 8 a.m. for the truck dispatches, and Jonstone would take no excuses. The subs routed their magazines on corners, went without lunch, and died in the streets. Jonstone would have us start casing the routes 30 minutes late -- spinning in his chair in his red shirt -- "Chinaski take route 539!" We'd start a half hour short but were still expected to get the mail up and out and be back on time. And once or twice a week, already beaten, fagged and fucked we had to make the night pickups, and the schedule on the board was impossible -- the truck wouldn't go that fast. You had to skip four or five boxes on the first run and the next time around they were stacked with mail and you stank, you ran with sweat jamming it into the sacks. I got laid all right. Jonstone saw to that.

Chapter Three

The subs themselves made Jonstone possible by obeying his impossible orders. I couldn't see how a man of such obvious cruelty could be allowed to have his position. The regulars didn't care, the union man was worthless, so I filled out a thirty page report on one of my days off, mailed one copy to Jonstone and took the other down to the Federal Building. The clerk told me to wait. I waited and waited and waited. I waited an hour and thirty minutes, then was taken in to see a little grey-haired man with eyes like cigarette ash. He didn't even ask me to sit down. He began screaming at me as I entered the door.

"You're a wise son of a bitch, aren't you?" "I'd rather you didn't curse me, sir!"

"Wise son of a bitch, you're one of those sons of bitches with a vocabulary and you like to lay it around!"

He waved my papers at me. And screamed: "MR. JONSTONE IS A FINE MAN!"

"Don't be silly. He's an obvious sadist," I said.

"How long have you been in the Post Office?"

"Three weeks."

"MR. JONSTONE HAS BEEN WITH THE POST OFFICE FOR 30 YEARS!"

"What does that have to do with it?"

"I said, MR. JONSTONE IS A FINE MAN!"

I believe the poor fellow actually wanted to kill me. He and Jonstone must have slept together.

"All right," I said, "Jonstone is a fine man. Forget the whole fucking thing." Then I walked out and took the next day off. Without pay, of course.



Continues...
Excerpted from post office by Charles Bukowski Copyright © 2007 by Charles Bukowski. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 79 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(37)

4 Star

(26)

3 Star

(9)

2 Star

(5)

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(2)

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 79 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted January 13, 2010

    And So He Did.

    Bukowski ends his novel with Chinaski claiming he decided to one day sit down and write his life story down, "and so he did", but not everything needs to be written. While some of the story was amusing, it arose mainly from the mundanity of such an ordinary existence. Chinaski was really quite ridiculous... the story begins when he is quite young and the last age he mentions is 36 before the end; however, the whole time I was reading this story I had the feeling I was reading the life story of a much older man who had lost his will to experience life and he was just waiting for death to come take him. Chinaski never really ever had any ambition to do or BE anything or anyone and just moved through life when he was forced to (like when his girlfriends decide to choose another man over him, he just quietly packs his clothes and leaves)... it's a really sad existence that I can't feel sorry for and the longer it went on I couldn't even find it amusing. I wanted some insane suburbanite (perhaps the crazy woman he faux-rapes) to just blow him out of the book so that Something would happen and this ridiculous excuse for a human being would quit taking up oxygen someone using their brain could find useful.
    Perhaps it's the current economic and global political situation, but other than the fact that the story is semi-autobiographical and Bukowski obviously went on to do something with himself, I couldn't find anything redeeming about a man who only did enough to get by (in squalor most of the time) and feels comfortable judging the rest of the working world. (Which goes along with Bukowski's constant portrayal of anyone in a management/supervisor position as an insane narcissistic power-tripping jerk.)
    Not my taste and mildly aggravating.

    1 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 14, 2012

    Mnwc

    Office open

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 6, 2012

    Awesome!!!

    I was surprised, but I loved every minute. He just shoots it strait and doesn't sugarcoat a thing.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 16, 2011

    Brilliant

    Bukowski. Read it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 15, 2011

    Very, very strange book

    Talk about going postal. An employers worst nightmare...

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  • Posted October 6, 2011

    One of my favorites

    Excellent

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 2, 2011

    recommend

    Easy read and believable that the main character wrote the book

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  • Posted October 22, 2010

    Great weekend read ... for the world weary....

    This is the perfect book to bring on a weekend trip. It's short and Bukowski writes to the point, centering on the frustration of working a soulless job and feeling like a nobody. His character is obviously himself. It's not all dour. Much of it is funny and much of that has to do with Bukowski's world weary sense of humor. Life can be a trial, and this book underscores that. Idiot bosses and emptiness and tedium of day to day life as a working stiff. I related to this. Great book.

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  • Posted October 28, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    I Also Recommend:

    9780876852637 9780872860742 9780876855577

    Not my favorite Bukowski but still very entertaining

    I'm a big Bukowski fan and "Post Office was not as entertaining to me as Bukowski's "Ham On Rye", "Factotum" or "Notes From A Dirty Old Man", but that's a bit like saying a vacation to Hawaii wasn't as good as a vacation to the Caribbean. It's a matter of subjectivity and preference. I recommend "Post Office" but it would not be my first Bukowski recommendation.

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  • Posted February 11, 2009

    A great read for those who like books such as, lord of the flies, 1984, and great classics that stimulate the mind.

    I would suggest this book to anyone with a mature mind.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 16, 2008

    Lets you get inside the head of the classic American shlub

    Post Office was the first Bukowski book I've read & I will DEFINITELY read more. His language appeals to the common reader in need of a laugh. Bukowski's protagonist Chinaski is a hopeless alcoholic who has been encumbered with his grating postal worker job for many, many years. His narrative on relationships, his home life, and the way he copes with everyday life are engrossing and even sad, yet oddly humorous at times. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a different sort of book.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 9, 2008

    ENTERTAINING

    Although I enjoyed this novel a lot, didn't think it was as entertaining as 'Factotum'. Looking forward to other of Bukowski's works.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 18, 2008

    Excellent

    While it is very much the norm in modern literature to focus on the self as the central theme of the writer's work, the novelist choses this motif at his own peril. Bukowski's grasp somewhat outstrips his reach this is because his talent to describe a reality is so much more powerful than the material that he chooses to create that reality. Very few writers since Hemingway can set the scene and paint the stage with such remarkable economy of the written word. I see the main difference between a great writer and a good one (and Bukowski is a very good one)is the scope and breadth his material. But Hemingway's world was much larger while Bukowski binds himself too closely in his nutshell. He takes us into strange fields filled with enchanting flowers, only to describe, in breathtaking detail, a blade of grass. Bukowski's fearless approach to truth as a writer comes from (what one can only assume) is his relative poverty as a human being...however well he reveals to us in this novel the transcendental beauty of his blade of grass, we long to be able devour the scents and absorb the sunlight which we can only sense is just outside the writer's realm of experience. Hattely

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 16, 2006

    Second only to HAM

    This is my second favorite Mr. B. Book, the first place going to his HAM ON RYE. While there are similarities in cynicism, wit, and style to other writers--think Chuck Palahniuk with his CHOKE or McCrae with his KATZENJAMMER, there's only ONE Bukowski. If you're not familiar with his works, again, I'd start with HAM, but this one works just as well.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 8, 2006

    Buk's best

    Charles Bukowski had a rough life. He didn't start publishing until later in life, maybe around 48 or so. Post Office is his first published novel. The book follows Henry Chinaski, a post office worker in California. It's very funny, as Chinaski delves into the politics and craziness of post office life he also has a romp or two with women on his mail route. By the end of Post Office, Chinaski is so fed up with the bs that he quits his job to write a novel. This is the best Buk novel I've read. His writing is swift and clean and the story moves superfast. Buk is a good writer. I'm looking forward to reading more.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 24, 2005

    One of the best

    Like an even more drunken Hemingway with a dash of Jackson Tippett McCrae insanity (Katzenjammer), Bukowski bleakly but matter-of-factly describes the underworld of the City of Angels through the eyes of a postal worker. Bukowski's resigned bitterness is the driving force behind this novel it is, as usual, brilliant. There's nothing Americans take as seriously as making money nor any more common way of getting it than by working for someone. So how come hardly anybody ever writes about this centerpiece of our lives? In 'typical' Bukowski style (brutal, frank, profane and with a lovely sense of noire humor) Hank has and I'm sure the US Post Office is not amused. For about 11 years he actually did work for the PO. But the book is really about work: what it does to you, how this one man coped with it, etc. It could just as easily been titled The Office, The Shop or The Factory. The theme is universal. I was reminded strongly of McCrae¿s ¿Katzenjammer: soon to be a major motion picture¿ with its themes of work abuse, nut-cases, and wry wit. He and Bukowski have a great deal in common and each should be read more than once.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 20, 2004

    going postal

    Working as Tech Support for a web hosting company for nearly 4 years, i've said that the transition from mail to e-mail would also bring about a transition to the phrase 'going postal' to 'going hostal'. The difference is our clients are our 'soup'. I recommend this book to anyone who works in customer service or any job where you deal with moron after moron, be it your boss or your customer. Post Office is hilarious. It was my first read of Bukowski's (save a few of the stories from 'Hot Water Music') and I'm already in love. I can see that much of my future paychecks will go straight to Bukowski. That is of course, if there is any money left after the liquor...

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 29, 2003

    Bukowski is fantastic

    This was my first Bukowski and it was hilarious and brilliant. I sped right through it.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 25, 2002

    excellent

    Definitely his best novel that I have read. I had previously preferred his short stories and poems to his novels, because he gets a bit repetitive after a while, but this one proved me wrong. A great read.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 2, 2000

    Sorta interesting, sorta pointless

    This book was OK. Since I'm a mailman myself, it was interesting to hear that working conditions are no better now than then. The main character basically just drinks and womanizes and works for the PO. That's about it. If you'd like to read about somebody else having a harder time earning a living than you, this book may make you feel better (ie you'd be hard pressed to be more of a loser than this guy) This book is a quick and easy read so at least if you don't get anything out of it, you won't feel like you wasted TOO much time...

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