Hot Water Music »

As famous for his notorious lifestyle as for his visceral poetry and prose, the late Charles Bukowski mined his experiences on America's mean streets to become one of the 20th century's most influential and widely imitated writers.

Hot Water Music is a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, published in 1983. The collection deals largely with: drinking, women, gambling, and writing. It is an important collection that establishes Bukowski's minimalist style and his thematic oeuvre.

Gale Research

"Lives of quiet desperation explode in apparently random and unmotivated acts of bizarre violence," describes Michael F. Harper in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, adding: "There is certainly a raw power in these stories, but Bukowski's hard-boiled fatalism seems to me the flip side of the humanism he denies and therefore just as false as the sentimentality he ridicules." Erling Friis-Baastad, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, concludes, "In his best work, Bukowski comes close to making us comprehend, if not the sense of it all, then at least its intensity. He cannot forget, and he will not let us forget, that every morning at 3 a.m. broken people lie `in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.'"