Charles Bukowski is an outstanding American writer and poet who has long become a cult figure throughout the world; Tom Waits and Jean Genet called him the best poet in America. Bukowski has always been more popular in Europe than in the United States, and in Germany alone the lifetime circulation of his books exceeded two million. His texts, despite the sometimes shocking naturalism, are full of lyricism, even a kind of sentimentality, and the image of the narrator, an alcoholic and a womanizer, is largely autobiographical (equally autobiographical is the film by Barbet Schroeder, directed by Bukowski, “The Drunk”, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway ) and evokes in the Russian reader inevitable associations with another famous outcast - Sergei Dovlatov. The book brought to your attention contains interviews with Bukowski over thirty years - from the early 1960s, when he, still barely publishing, managed to earn fame as an “underground hero,” and until the last years of his life, when cult recognition finally became widespread.< /p>