South of No North
Written by Charles Bukowski
Narrated by Christian Baskous
4/5
()
About this audiobook
South of No North is a collection of short stories written by Charles Bukowski that explore loneliness and struggles on the fringes of society.
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 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.
More audiobooks from Charles Bukowski
Post Office: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ham On Rye: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hollywood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Factotum Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Drinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Cats Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hot Water Music Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pulp Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to South of No North
Related audiobooks
Crapalachia: A Biography of Place Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Have and Have Not Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hot Water Music Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Drinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pulp Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Buk: The Life & Times of Charles Bukowski Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The RUM DIARY: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Cats Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Blasphemer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Junky: The Definitive Text of 'Junk' Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yage Letters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst: Unabridged Audio Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Queer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scale: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sonny Sunshine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wild Boys Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sucker's Portfolio: A Collection of Previously Unpublished Writing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An American Dream Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Snuff Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tropic of Capricorn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hunger Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Big Trip Up Yonder Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus' Son: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jack Kerouac: A Few Nights on the Road with Jack Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Man Without a Country Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ginsberg Remembers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
General Fiction For You
A Court of Thorns and Roses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Court of Mist and Fury Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Court of Wings and Ruin Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stardust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And Then There Were None Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Omens: A Full Cast Production Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Court of Frost and Starlight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It Ends with Us Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Their Eyes Were Watching God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Neverwhere Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Gods [TV Tie-In]: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Duke and I Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dead Zone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Return of the King Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paris Apartment: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for South of No North
201 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the stories of South of No North, Charles Bukowski makes drinking, gambling, job-hating, living in fleabag dives, drunken sex, vomiting, agonizing over women, and agonizing over not writing (“hours of sitting in a chair in the middle of a room, run through and stricken”) seem almost romantic. These are brutally funny stories. Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski narrates most of them. A magazine editor to Chinaski: “I want you to interview this bitch who married the cannibal. Make the sex BIG. Mix love with horror, you know?” “I know. I’ve been doing it all my life.”On his pessimistic view of life: “I keep remembering the female who screamed at me: ‘You’re so god damned negative! Life can be beautiful!’ I suppose it can, and especially with a little less screaming.” Speaking of pessimism, Chinaski on tourists in Avalon on Catalina Island: “square white rotting bodies, and striped shorts, eyeless eyes and mouthless mouths, they walked along, very colorful, as if color might wake up death and turn it into life.” Chinaski is no less hard on himself: “Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees.”These are searing stories that don’t hold back. More Chinaski on life: “We didn’t want much and couldn’t get that.”
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A number of good Chinaski stories unfortunately can't save this overall ho-hum collection. Of Charles Bukowski's three chosen modes, verse, novel, and short story, the last of these has proven the weakest. Of course, chances are, if you're reading this book you're a big fan like I am, so you'll probably read it anyway but to me this has been his worst book besides Septuagenarian Stew.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Taken as a whole I didn't enjoy this collection of shorts as much as Hot Water Music. Maybe I'm remembering HWM wrong but there seemed much more smut and self-aggrandizing in South of No North (the story where Chinaski beats up Hemmingway in a boxing match and scores with Thomas Wolfe's hot girlfriend being the most ludicrous, but funny, example of this).True, the smut does become less prominent as the collection goes on (no more stories about men having sex with mannequins) and that's when Bukowski's writing starts to shine. All these stories might be about drunk writers and their "whores" but there's real emotion in Bukowski's writing and when he's at his best it can touch a raw nerve. It's just a shame you have to dig deep under all the sex and booze to find something worthwhile.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brilliant.