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Billy Childish

Born into the emerging middle classes of the 1950s, Billy Childish takes us on a nightmarish voyage through a childhood blighted by mental and sexual abuse. Stumbling onward into adolescence he lays bare a young man's desperate attempts to make sense of a world distorted by alcohol, bullies and yes men, This striking first novel, or 'creative confession', is at turns hilarious and harrowing. Laced with lindes of unforgettable poetry it is that rare and wonderful thing - a book which had to be written.

My Fault

Charles Bukowski

Henry Chinaski is a lowlife loser with a hand-to-mouth existence. His menial post office day job supports a life of beer, one-night stands and racetracks. Lurid, uncompromising and hilarious, Post Office is a landmark in American literature, and over 1 million copies have been sold worldwide. 
 
The new edition is augmented with an anecdotal introduction by the modern Welsh cult-literary author, Niall Griffiths - a writer who was working in a British post office when he first read Bukowski's Post Office.

Post Office

Charles Bukowski's brilliant, fantastical pastiche of a detective story. Packed with wit, invention and Bukowski's trademark lowlife adventures, it is the final novel of one of the most enjoyable and influential cult writers of the last century. 
 
Nicky Belane, private detective and career alcoholic, is a troubled man. He is plagued not just by broads, booze, lack of cash and a raging ego, but also by the surreal jobs he's been hired to do. Not only has been hired to track down French classical author Celine - who's meant to be dead - but he's also supposed to find the elusive Red Sparrow - which may or may not be real.

Pulp

A Novel

Henry Chinaski, an outcast, a loner and a hopeless drunk, drifts around America from one dead-end job to another, from one woman to another and from one bottle to the next. Uncompromising, gritty, hilarious and confessional in turn, his downward spiral is peppered with black humour. 
 
Factotum follows Charles Bukowski's bestselling Post Office, his highly autobiographical first novel. Bukowski's Beat Generation writing reflects his slum upbringing, his succession of menial jobs and his experience of low life urban America. He died in 1994 and is widely acknowledged as one of the most distinctive writers of the last fifty years. 
 
Neeli Cherkovski was a close friend of Bukowski and is the author of Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (Random House, 1991)

Factotum

Beginning in 1967, Bukowski wrote the column "Notes of A Dirty Old Man" for the underground newspaper Open City. Perennially drunk, broke and in search of a woman, Bukowski takes on the guise of a wise fool as he ventures through America's seedy lowlife. Peopled by Kerouac, Burroughs and other much less salubrious characters, his exploits provoke humour and despair, whilst highlighting the inherent beauty and futility of life.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Inspired by D.H. Lawrence, Chekhov and Hemingway, Bukowski's writing is passionate, extreme and has attracted a cult following, while his life was as weird and wild as the tales he wrote. This collection of short stories gives an insight into the dark, dangerous lowlife of Los Angeles that Bukowski inhabited. 
 
From prostitutes to classical music, Bukowski ingeniously mixes high and low culture in his 'tales of ordinary madness'. These are angry yet tender, humorous and haunting portrayals of life in the underbelly of Los Angeles.

Tales of Ordinary Madness

Spike Milligan

Spike Milligan's publishing career began over forty years ago when Silly Verse for Kids was published in 1959. His poems were inspired by listening to his own children, and subsequently his grandchildren, and marvelling at the way they could invent new words or incorporate sound effects into their everyday language. Spike did not regard children as small adults, but as entirely different species who lived in a secret, magical world that very few adults understood. For decades he delved into this world, delighting children - and adults - of all ages with his poems and stories. 
 
Illustrated throughout with Spike's own drawings and specially commissioned artworks, this is an ideal read-alone or read-aloud book for Spike fans of all ages, featuring: Silly Verse for Kids (1959), The Bald Twit Lion (1968), A Book of Milliganimals (1968), Unspun Socks from a Chicken's Laundry (1968), Sir Nobonk and the Terrible, Awful, Dreadful, Nasty Dragon (1982), and Startling Verse for All the Family (1987).

A Children's Treasury of Milligan

Classic Stories and Poems by Spike Milligan

YOU CAN TAKE THE MAN OUT OF THE GUTTER, BUT YOU CAN'T TAKE THE GUTTER OUT OF THE MAN 
 
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.

Women

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