Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski was a well-known American writer of the 20th century who wrote more than forty books of various genres, including novels, poems, essays, and short stories. His works sometimes shock with their realism, but at the same time they are full of lyricism and a distinctive kind of sentimentality. The novel “Ham on Rye” (often translated as “Bread with Ham”) is considered one of Bukowski’s most moving works. Like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Catcher in the Rye,” it tells of the adult world through the eyes of a sensitive child who encounters the duplicity and vanity of that adult world. The novel follows the child’s gradual growing up, his discovery of alcohol, women, gambling, and literature, and it is written with the same admiration as Bukowski’s novels and the works of Lawrence, Hemingway, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.