Charles Bukowski: "World Here I Am" Interviews and Meetings, 1963-1993

by David Stephen

The interviews contained in this book document Charles Bukowski's long way to global recognition, beginning in 1963, when he interviewed a journalist from the Chicago Literary Times in his one-bedroom flat in Hollywood and ending at a swimming pool in San Pedro, where in August 1993 , just seven months before his death at the age of 73, he answered questions from a German reporter.
These conversations, written by American, British, Italian, German and French journalists, will provide you with a great dose of Charles Bukowski. You will probably read more in them than you would expect to know about any writer.
The topics discussed here by Bukowski include: classical music, loneliness, drinking, admired authors, difficult youth, writing rituals, inspiration, madness, women, sex, love and horse racing.

382 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

David Stephen (1911 - 1989) was a Scottish naturalist, author and journalist. In 1947 he became nature writer with the Daily Record, then nine years later moved to The Scotsman, where worked for a number of years. He was the first director of Palacerigg Country Park, near Cumbernauld, Lanarkshire.

Reviews

[Claudia Kania · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bukowski is a crazy old glorious drunk bastard. I purchased this Polish translation of an archive of Bukowski's interviews in small bookshop somewhere in Europe for some light reading on my plane trip back to the States. Instead, what I got was so much more. Charles became my friend. I felt a sempiternal closeness to him, as if we were companions since our childhoods, back when his softness wasn't left dented and calloused by abuse, drink, and life itself. Bukowski despises artificiality, is repulsed by the so-called "intellectual elite", and is not impressed by those who dare call themselves artists. He lived, oh God had he lived. Lived through fights and women and drink, homelessness, poverty, hell and heaven. Charles' writing is a product of nothing but what his consciousness had endured. As the chronology of the interviews progresses, Bukowski begins to lose his risk and madness as he nears old age, but preserves a spark of vitality that will never be consumed even by the confines of death. Bukowski's poetry is immortal; is plumes the underbelly of civilization's forgotten people-the drunks, the whores, the bums, the lost, he fallen. They find solace in his ruggedness, in a softness and salvation only a man who has already faced death in the face and gave it the middle finger can offer. "I hear you," he seems to say, "I hear you and I understand. You will not be forgotten." Neither will Bukowski; cemented in eternity, his writing will continue to comfort the disturbed and disturb those in comfort. As the line from of his most famous poems goes: It's the only good fight there is.