Music for Aguardente

Music for Low-Life (1983) is Bukowski pure and simple, without compromise. Thirty brief stories, consistently biting and grotesque, in which we frequently encounter the infamous alter ego Chinaski and the usual suspects in the author's alcoholic tales: lives run aground, intoxicated by incurable frustrations, men seeking redemption through a sock and a half and betting time and again on the wrong horses.

The stories collected here are tonics for the sordid and obscure vein in all of us and flashes of the solitary nature of man, clearly captured by this destructive post-beat messenger. On a stumbling tour of bad neighborhoods, Bukowski, true to himself, continues the chronicle of the dispossessed of American society, this time to the sound of hot water running from the radiators in the wretched motels of Los Angeles.