Women

Henry Chinaski is fifty, a minor literary celebrity after years of dead-end jobs and cheap rooms. The poetry readings pay, the fan mail arrives, and for the first time in his life women come looking for him rather than the other way round.

The book centres on his volatile affair with Lydia Vance, a sculptor he meets at a reading, and on the string of relationships that follow and overlap with it — women he meets through his readings, his mail, and his drinking. Each pairing runs much the same course: heavy drinking, jealousy, sex, break-ups, reconciliations, and a return to the typewriter.

Written in Bukowski's flat, unsparing prose and published in 1978, Women is his third novel, and the one that finds Chinaski successful without finding him any better at being a person.