Bread with Ham

Charles Bukowski is one of the iconic American writers of the 20th century, author of more than forty books, including novels, poems, essays, and short stories. Despite sometimes shocking realism, 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" by Mark Twain and "The Catcher in the Rye" by Jerome Salinger, it is written from the perspective of an impressionable child dealing with the hypocrisy, pretentiousness, and vanity of the adult world. A child gradually discovering alcohol and women, gambling and brawling, as well as the works of Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky.