Bread with Ham

Charles Bukowski is one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, author of more than forty books, including novels, poetry, essays, and short stories. Despite his sometimes shocking naturalism, his texts are full of lyricism, even a peculiar sentimentality. "Bread with Ham" is Bukowski's most poignant novel. Like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Catcher in the Rye," it is written from the perspective of an impressionable child dealing with the duplicity, pretentiousness, and vanity of the adult world. A child who gradually discovers alcohol and women, gambling and brawling, D. H. Lawrence and Hemingway, Turgenev and Dostoevsky.