Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and Poems. by Bukowski, Charles - 1990.

Santa Rosa,:: Black Sparrow Press,, 1990.. First Printing of the First US Edition. A Fine copy in a Fine Acetate dust jacket as issued. This us one of only 500 copies signed by Bukowski and numbered. In this collection, Bukowski confronts the reader with many of the down-and-out themes he has been writing about for years. His work for the most part is populated here with society's losers--alcoholic bums, mad housewives, compulsive gamblers--their decaying selves slipping inexorably into oblivion. Life's supposed winners fare no better. The movie star in the story "Fame" is murdered by a fanatic fan. The writer in "Action," who once smugly refused the Pulitzer Prize, squanders all his money at the racetrack and wastes his creative abilities in the process. Even the author's fictionalized self, Henry Chinaski, rescued from being "a pile of human rubble" by an editor interested in his work, can never transcend the junk heap of human existence. He continues to rely, paradoxically, on booze to help him survive.