The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

Charles Bukowski’s short stories are the natural habitat of his particular genius: compressed, vernacular, brutal, and funny in ways that make their brutality simultaneously more and less bearable. The stories gathered here — written over decades and drawing on the bars, racetracks, boarding houses, and low-rent Los Angeles neighbourhoods that provided Bukowski with his material — present the full range of his talent: the empathy beneath the cynicism, the precision beneath the rawness, and the specific quality of attention he brought to lives that most fiction ignores entirely.

The title story, ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’, is among the best things he wrote — a portrait of a woman so singular that no conventional category of beauty could contain her. Published by Virgin Books.