The old bungalow on De Longpre Avenue, the house where Charles Bukowski wrote many of his best known novels and became the voice of Los Angeles, is now the subject of a dispute between preservationists, who want to turn it into a monument, and the owners of the property who claim that the writer was a Nazi sympathiser and want him to be forgotten.
“This man loved Hitler,” Ms Gureyeva, who is Jewish, told the LA Weekly newspaper. “This is my house, not Bukowski’s. I will never allow the city of Los Angeles to turn it into a monument for this man.”
Gerald Locklin, author of the biography Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet, said he found no evidence of anti-Semitism in Bukowski’s work or the correspondence he shared with the author.
Bukowski, who was credited with the title of this post, was controversial in his lifetime, and, it seems, the story over the fate of his home is going to run on for a little while yet.
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Natalia Ginzburg, who died in 1991, published this, one of her last novels, in 1985. Written entirely in letter-form it follows the fortunes of a group of friends when one of them, Giuseppe, leaves his flat in Rome where he has lived for more than twenty years, to go and live with his brother in [...]
The Guardian’s edited version of “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” by Michel Mok, first published in the New York Post, September 25 1936
The author’s wife, Zelda, had been ill for some years. There was talk, said his friends, of an attempt at suicide on her part one evening [...]
The novelist sits down with CBC interviewer, Evan Soloman:
By my age and stage you’re going to know a couple of things, and if you don’t know those things, where have you been all your life?
The essays Atwood talks about in this interview were published as Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on [...]
A writer’s main asset is intuition; too many facts impede intuition. A writer needs to know so many things, but there are so many things he doesn’t need to know — he needs to know human things [...]
John David Pears (JD) was a writer because literature allowed him to transform the black internal chaos of his days into something crafted and worthy. Although he thought of himself as a novelist he spent an inordinate amount of time playing drums with his group, Fried (not Freud) and the Behaviourists and for the past [...]
What it was about those uncanny scenes, and not just in movies but also in novels and stories, was a parallel with real life happenings. That instinctual compulsion to return to a prior state of being. Marie knew that whatever pleasure she attained in her life, no matter how much happiness she found, there would [...]
‘This is one of the big divides between your generation and mine,’ Celia said. ‘Feminism’s been a wonderful thing and I’m glad I lived long enough to be part of it. But evil isn’t really anything to do with gender. People of either sex are capable of anything. This man who is set on destroying [...]
‘Shaz’s made some tea,’ Stell said. ‘She used to work at the hospital.’
‘I’ve put two sugars in and a drop of brandy,’ Shaz said. ‘Sip it.’
She handed him a mug with a graphic of a young, auburn-haired nun on the side. They watched him sip the tea. Ruben cupped the mug in his hands and [...]
‘The Porsche and the peacock tail are exactly the same thing. They are both in their different ways, expensive, costly. They’re handicaps; and they have to be or they wouldn’t be reliable indicators of the fitness of a potential mate.
‘The tail and the Porsche are both useless in terms of survival, but their uselessness is [...]
