Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters, 1960-1970

by Charles Bukowski

Book Overview

Screams from the Balcony is a collection of letters chronicling Charles Bukowski's life as he tries to get published and work at a postal office, all while drinking and gambling. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0876859155
• ISBN13: 9780876859155
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Screamstream.

This truly is a great book, a must for Bukowski fans and a book to which I have found myself returning many times over the years. It starts off very sedate in the 60s, with a meek Bukowski writing well-mannered letters to people from small presses, but he gathers in steam and anger as the book goes along until by halfway through he is writing endless drunken stream-of-consciousness scream-of-semiconsciousness ramblerants to all and sundry, using his typewriter as a machinegun to fire syllabic bullets and howl from his cage and keep a small part of himself alive. The uncensored inebriated letters he composes are brilliant, funny and poignant and erudite and poetic and stupid and depressing in turns, and he unfailingly tells the truth, no matter what the subject under discussion. His prized loner status is somewhat undermined by the sheer volume of mail he sends, a deeply shy man for whom correspondence is obviously extremely important, his way of communicating with the world and staying relatively sane. But his letters are never aloof or self-conscious, pouring out of the man without being labored over or pretentious. Seeing reproductions of his artistic letters, full of spelling errors and covered in doodlings of his, is illuminating too. What ultimately comes out of this excellent volume, and the two following it, Living On Luck and Reach For The Sun, is a portrait of a man who simply HAS to write or he will explode. He veers close to suicide in places, as evidenced in grim letters to Sherri Martinelli (a volume of letters to her, Beerspit Night And Cursing, has also been published, and displays a cultured side of Bukowski rarely shown to male correspondents) but by the end of the volume he has quit the post office and is ready to take on the wordwork world. And the rest is history. This is a great book and I would highly recommend it to anybody. The End.

Amazing...

I didn't think I'd find another Buk. I liked as much as 'Notes' & 'Love is a Dog', but the unadulterated, excerpted rants in this volume give such a great view, that's just THAT much more pure than his 'fiction'. It's awesome to see story ideas & themes from his other books coming forward in his mind as his friends & colleagues encourage him to write novels. This is the first book of Buk. letters I've gotten, so I can't offer comparisions, but I'll definitely be getting more. Love it.

The Sheri Martinelli Years

Bukowski's letters of the 1960s are filled with the passion and energy of the time. It was an age of rebellion and recklessness, and in this period Bukowski's own writing really came of age; you can feel the confidence growing in page after page. His friends were legion, and so many of them seemed to have kept his letters you sense that even then, they knew they were holding on to something special, even if mass fame wouldn't come to CB for another decade or more. During the time Bukowski was also writing numerous letters to the Beat poet Sheri Martinelli, who had also been the long distance muse to Ezra Pound when he was locked away safely in St Elizabeth's in Washington DC. Both sides of their correspondence have been published and are worth looking into, because how often are we privy to the intimate exchanges of a pair of genius minds?

jarring

Will jar the senses. Nothing cute here. The author, Bukowski, barely holding on by his fingertips (before he started to make any money with his literary eforts.) Highly recommend it to anyone who preffers the real to the slickly put together phony books out there by so-called writers being published by the bloated, greedy East Coast houses who don't know what the hell they're doing. Why so harsh? Because I don't see any originality in books put out by them, that's why. How can that be? Ask them. In their desperate, stupid efforts to make every book a sure-fire best-seller they put editors on it who beat all originality right out of these manuscripts. Thus, usually, we are left with unreadable garbage lacking real style and/or originality. And Bukowski? Well, the reason Black sparrow took him on is because his writing was not about that phony slickness that so often New York publishers seem to want and pay the big bucks for (only to fall on their butts--more often than not). Bukowski's style brings to mind another writer or two: Kirk Alex (Working the Hard Side of the Street), Dan Fante: Mooch, Spitting off Tall Buildings, etc. Buy it, read it, and find out what life was like for the man who brought you Post Office, Hollywood, and other masterpieces before the well-earned rocognition towards the latter part of his life. Sadly, he is no longer with us, but his books are. For that we are grateful. Our hat is off to John Martin at Black Sparrow. Thank you, sir, for publishing the books.

Charles Bukowski at his drunkest

This book bounces all over the place, though it's written in such a freeform style that nothing necessarily needs to make sense,and the sentences that run on for a couple of pages without punctuation can get tiresome. But definitely reccomended for CB fans... he speaks his truest.