Misogyny, misogyny, misogyny....that's all everyone sees. Few see the true character of Hank, only the brutal sexual descriptions, the words beginning with "C" and his practice of "mounting" whatever drunken soul may have wandered into his piss-stained bed. This is one of the most American novels I have ever read. It tells the story of the common man, overburdened by the memories of his abusive youth, beleagured by his own unsightly appearance and wallowing in the depths of alcoholism. Few feel

I discovered Charles Bukowski while in Las Vegas, in December 2000.My dad thought it was a good idea to take his 19 year old daughter to Vegas. Because I LOVE watching everyone else gamble and drink while I can't participate! To be fair, we saw some really good shows (Blue Man Group and Mystere). And the buffets were exciting (Paris was wonderful).And ! I did get screamed at by a lady on the bus that goes up and down the strip. She looked like Mimi from the Drew Carey show. Well, she dropped her...

The leading crazy lady's name is Lydia. I can relate. Charles Bukowski has a way of betraying you and making you laugh in spite of yourself; disgusting you and then melting your heart with one tender and insightful paragraph you do not expect, at a moment that doesn't seem appropriate in context to that which he is speaking. It is impossible to love Bukowski and impossible not to love him. This book is just a delight, if you can absorb it. He is mushy soft at his core.

boooooorrrrrr-iinnnnnnnnnnnnnggggI loved Bukowski as a young teenager and now that I go back and re-read I can only imagine that I enjoyed the truth and rawness at that age when I was getting lied to everywhere abt. the relations between men and women. NOW the misogyny is effing boring. Like the crap I see every effing day. I find it interesting that some people find it so shocking because I know at least 10 men that feel this way abt. women. OVER IT. Don't wanna read abt. it now.

Women, Charles BukowskiWomen focuses on the many dissatisfaction's Chinaski faced with each new woman he encountered. One of the women featured in the book is a character named Lydia Vance; she is based on Bukowski's one-time girlfriend, the sculptress and sometime poet Linda King. Another central female character in the book is named "Tanya" who is described as a 'tiny girl-child' and Chinaski's pen-pal. تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز چهارم ماه ژانویه سال 2010 میلادیعنوان: زنان (زنها)؛ نویسنده: چارلز

This book is CRAZY!!! I cannot believe I read the entire thing in 3 days. You can't put it down. In fact, it made it's rounds through at least 8 people I know of, and it's probably still making the rounds. Everyone had the same experience. You start it and Bukowski goes into the most sexist, vulgar, repulsive descriptions of the main character's relationship to women, but something makes you keep reading. I stopped at several points wondering, "why the hell am I reading this?", yet I went on. Th...

Freaks always attract other freaks – it must be some immutable law of nature.I had on my dead father’s overcoat, which was too large. My pants were too long, the cuffs came down over the shoes and that was good because my stockings didn’t match, and my shoes were down at the heels. I hated barbers so I cut my own hair when I couldn’t get a woman to do it. I didn’t like to shave and I didn’t like long beards, so I scissored myself every two or three weeks. My eyesight was bad but I didn’t like gl...

Probably my least favorite Bukowski novel, if only because it is the one most commonly used against him by readers with a college freshmen understanding of what misogyny actually is. Anyone who's ever read the man's oeuvre or seen any of his interviews and walked away with the impression that he was anything but an equal-opportunity misanthrope might have a slightly skewed view of things. If anything, he was harder on the men around him, and he hated everyone for their greed, cruelty, and dullne...

Reading "Women" is like watching a porno. At first, all that wanton sex is exciting and seductive and yeah, kind of funny too; then it starts to get repetitive and a little disturbing; pretty soon you're disgusted with all of it: sex and women and men and most of all, yourself. You promise that you'll never watch again but, deep down, you know you will. You dirty bastard.

In the words of a reviewer on Amazon, "First off, this book will offend people. It will probably offend you." This book hit a little too close to home (you could say I've met and loved this man in real life). At first, reading it was easy; the language is not complex and the material is the definition of "page-turner" - sex, love, drugs, alcohol - in raw, unapologetic realism. And then around page 200 it all became too much. Chinaski does another poetry reading, beds (and then rapes, though stra...

"I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive on its own terms."—Chinaski/Bukowski, responding to a woman who has organized his poetry reading and is surprised to find him rather nice and “normal” in person.I am in general a kind of fan of Bukowski, especially his poetry and early Henry Chinaski novels. He’s brutally honest, nasty about pretentious people, and at the same time viciously self-deprecating. He worked for decades in factories, in the post office, in a variety of odd jobs he...

I feel stupid getting into Charles Bukowski so much as a 43 year old guy with kids, a house, and a job. I mean, I read him in my late teens with all my friends and we romanticized his shitty SRO hotel existence. But over the last year I've either read or re-read all of his (non-poetry) books except Pulp, and I can see a depth and craft of which I wasn't aware as a kid. Women, turns out, is my favorite of the catalog.I don't get much voyeuristic pleasure from Women. You know how recently-divorced...

I'll sum it up for you.Drink, fuck, drink, horse race, drink, driiiiiiiink, write, drink, drink, watch a boxing match, give a reading, drink, fuck, drink, fuck, fuck, sleep, drink, write, drink, drink, fuck, drink, fuck, give a reading, drink, fuck, drink, fuuuuuuuck, drink, drink, fuck, fuck, drink, fuck.These are the names of the ladies in his life: Lydia, Katherine, Joanna, Nicole, Debra, Tanya, Gertrude, Hilda, Iris, Mercedes, Liza,and Tammie. (There are others; I missed a few.)There is some...

It was love at first letter with Bukowski. This was months ago. I read the letter he wrote in ’86, (posted at “Letters of Note” in 2012,) and I just knew. I had a thing for that letter, and wanted to devour the words of the man who wrote it.I gulped down “Women” quickly because that was the type of book it was. Reading Bukowski requires the willingness to loosen up. It is not easy to read this stuff through an ideological, feminist, or moral lens. This man does not bother to brush up his charact...

This was my first Bukowski and I don’t believe it will be the last. It’s good to take a peek at his writing when you get too serious in your head and your brain begins to get hot, it’s good to take a glance at his writing to cool it down and get into the life of an ugly old son of a bitch who is, as he describes himself: “I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon”, a writer who “write[s] a lot of crap.” But if you ask me I’d say he writes interes...

My God, this book is perfect. I finished it a day ago, so I've had time to digest it. It's gonna be hard to move onto my next book, my rebound read, because I'm still hung up on this one. I'm in love with it. I can't find a single flaw in it. This was my first Bukowski book, and I doubt his others will be able to live up to it for me. This would have to be one of my favorite books of all time, right up there with House of Leaves.Basically this is autobiographical fiction about a brief period in

"Low life writer and alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. Now, at the age of fifty, he is living the life of a rock star, running three hundred hangovers a year and a sex life that would cripple Casanova. "Women" is a riotous and uncompromisingly vivid account of life on the edge." - New YorkerWhat a redundant and glamorous way to describe Bukowski's protagonist/alter ego, Henry Chinaski..."Women" spins around Henry's later sexual life (in his 50's). Now as a minor famous writer, Henry

Women is definitely not Bukowski at his finest, nevertheless, the book has its merits. In this book, we get a slightly different glimpse at Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, and once we get past the same scenery in which the only thing that changes are the sets of legs spread before him, we are offered a look into a life of a man who is nearing his top game (in term of recognition) while being torn inside. Torn by the insatiable appetite to taste all the fruit forbidden to him for the first

I think it was more of a personal challenge to actually finish the book. I wanted to throw it away every time I opened it, but I always hoped that maybe, maybe there was a good part coming. Could have spent the money on a decent lunch instead of this.The main character spends so much time describing the sexual encounters and his drunken stupor that you feel no remorse, no sentiment from him, no nothing. Just a child that sees a new toy and damn sure he's going to get it and play with it, then to...

Repulsive.There it is, my one word review of Women.As I'm reading the book, hating it more and more, I'm wondering how I can ever review it. I'm not too fond of reviewing books anyway, but I didn't know how I could even share my thoughts on it. I decided I'd just do an alphabetical 26-word review, starting with "atrocious" and ending with "zany" with each word a representation of what I hated about the book.Way too much work.So why didn't I like Women? I was turned off by what I perceived as Buk...

I know I am not the only one who has a love and hate relationship with Bukowski. Some said he was their hero. I can understand you, though. Partly because he was so relatable-in a sense that my (our) feelings and thoughts were articulated and was better put into words in his writings. In my age, I have no idea what I'm doing and Bukowski made me feel that it is okay to feel so. To hate my job. To hate my past lovers. To feel lazy. To feel lonely. To feel unsatisfied. To feel degraded just becaus...

I enjoyed this novel. Though it's thick, I found it an easy read, the type of book that I could dip into at any time. The structure of this novel is odd or unconventional in that at first it seems repetitive, this happens then that, with women entering and leaving his life. But somehow you grow used to it. It's almost like a compilation of episodes that often don't lead anywhere but allow you to understand the protagonist who's obviously Bukowski. I'll say it's pretty funny too. Bukowski's sense...

How do I rate a book on here with 6 stars?When I was a teenager this book was the first dirty novel I read and it was the point I became obsessed with Bukowski. Now reading this many years later I still love this book, it still feels really dirty too. Bukowski is the ultimate rock-star of the poetry world and this book is the proof.Bukowski will shag any woman who is up for it, he'll treat them mean and in some cases drive them insane, he makes mistakes and doesn't learn from them cos he doesn't...

I really didn't know how to take this book and I'm not sure that I have it figured out yet. I knew little about Bukowski going into this one but it didn't take very long to figure out that the antihero Hank Chinaski is actually the alter ego of Bukowski. Both aging writers, German birth, -ski surname, etc, etc. The story seemed pointless at first, very sexual in nature; grittily,needlessly specific sexual content that couldn't even claim to be erotic in nature. Chinaski has carnal relations with...

I got this from a friend and read it at an age when guess I could have liked it - I didn't (like it that is, that's what a GoodReads one star is - Didn't like it). Everything that positive reviews list as reasons to like this book are the same ones that makes it utterly uninteresting to me. Never got it, had it been today there's no way I would have finished this. But I learned from the experience and won't ever pick up anything else by him.

I have never laughed so much in all my life over a book more than this!, it's hilarious, farcical, damn right rude, and just SO readable!. Thank you Hank, you bought a joyful tear to a man's eye!

Well, this is one of the instances where I'm not sure how I should start my review. It's not because I don't have anything to say, because trust me, I have sooo many opinions, I just have no idea where my rant should begin. First of all, how the fuck is Bukowski this popular? Please someone explain this to me, because I can't wrap my mind around the fact that people actually love and worship him as an author. And how did he not have like a thousand children and didn't die of liver cirosis or STD...

Okay, Wikipedia really mislead me on this one and it should be ashamed of itself."Women is centered around Chinaski's later life, as a celebrated poet and writer, not as a dead-end lowlife." I say bullshit to you, Wikipedia. The 10% I managed before throwing the book down in disgust would beg to differ."At times, Women has the tendency to become chauvinistic."Understatement."Aside from Chinaski's discontent, Bukowski added a certain comedic flair to his novel that may expose some women to the wa...

I often find myself picking up Bukowski in times of stress or other psychological need. His writing is often tough and brutal, difficult to navigate, a reminder of the ugliness of the world. And yet, there is always that undercurrent of truth, of beauty hidden beneath the grime. Or maybe the word I’m really looking for is “human.” Yes, that’s it. Reading Bukowski reminds me of what it’s like to be human, warts and faults and pettiness and farts and bad breath and all. It’s always an adventure re...

I was a writer. I was a dirty old man. Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool. The most one could hope for in a human relationship, I decided, was two and one-half years.منطق بعضی از کتا...