Post Office

Henry Chinaski takes a job at the post office almost by accident and stays for the better part of a dozen years—first as a substitute mail carrier trudging endless Los Angeles routes in all weather, then as a clerk chained to a sorting scheme designed, it seems, to break the human spirit. In between, there are the horses at the track, cheap rooms, cheaper wine, and a rotating cast of women who drift in and out of his bed and his misery.

Charles Bukowski's first novel is a lightly fictionalized account of his own years in the postal service, narrated in the flat, funny, unsparing voice that made him a cult figure. Chinaski endures supervisors, quotas, hangovers, and heartbreak with the same weary defiance, refusing to pretend that any of it means more than it does.

Blunt, profane, and mordantly comic, Post Office is a landmark of the "dirty realism" that Bukowski helped invent—a portrait of ordinary drudgery and stubborn survival on the margins of American life.