Hollywood

John Pinchot, un enloquecido director de cine, se empeña en llevar a la pantalla sus relatos de juventud, o sea, la autobiografía de un alcohólico empedernido. Chinaski desconfía del proyecto, aunque acepta a regañadientes escribir el guión de la película. Y comienzan los verdaderos problemas. El autor cuenta las experiencias de su alter ego Chinaski durante la filmación de la película Barfly, interpretada por Mickey Rourke y Faye Dunaway. Una visión sarcástica, ácida y corrosiva de los entretelones de Hollywood en la que desfilan personajes curiosos y excéntricos. Un mundo duro donde todo gira alrededor del sacrosanto dólar.

Publishers Weekly

Bukowski ( The Roominghouse Madrigals ) has written over 30 books of poetry and fiction in which he uses the persona of the artistic bum with reasonable success. In this flimsy novel, Henry Chinaski is asked to write a screenplay, and thus Bukowski continues his thinly disguised autobiography (Bukowski himself wrote the screenplay for the recent, self-referential Barfly ). When all the Hollywood types Chinaski encounters--directors, lawyers, producers, actors, actresses--fit the same drunken-outcast-but-artistic-genius mold, Bukowski seems to have exhausted his resourcefulness. His characters lose their individuality and the novel lacks force and perspective. This book deteriorates into juvenile satire in which familiar, real-life figures appear with the letters of their names shifted slightly: the famous director Jon-Luc Modard, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sanrah, Frances Ford Lopalla and an obvious Norman Mailer stand-in called Victor Norman. (May)

As famous for his notorious lifestyle as for his visceral poetry and prose, the late Charles Bukowski mined his experiences on America's mean streets to become one of the 20th century's most influential and widely imitated writers.