#AmericanWriters
the history of melancholia includes all of us. me, I writhe in dirty sheets while staring at blue walls and nothing.
my first and only wife painted and she talked to me about it: it’s all so painful
An old man asked me for a cigarett… and I carefully dealt out two. Been lookin’ for job. Gonna stand in the sun and smoke.” He was close to rags and rage
That night I took Tammie to the harness races. We went upstairs to the second deck and sat down. I brought her a program and she stared at it a while. (At the harness races, past perfor...
It was another Sunday that we got into the Model-T in search of my Uncle John. “He has no ambition,” said my father. “I don’t see how he can hold his god-damned head up and look people ...
So I was surprised when the phone rang a couple of nights later and it was Cassie. “What are you doing, Hank?” She gave me the address, it was either Westwood or West L. A. “I have plen...
I was sitting with an anarchist from Beverly Hills, Ben Solvnag, who was writing my biography when I heard her footsteps on the court walk. I knew the sound—they were always fast and fr...
There are sketches on the walls of… and outside a large green bus swer… insanity sprung from a waving line… says the radio, and Jane Austin,… “I am going to do her portrait on…
I awaken about noon and go out to… in my old torn bathrobe. I’m hung over hair down in my eyes barefoot
My mother went to her low-paying job each morning and my father, who didn’t have a job, left each morning too. Although most of the neighbors were unemployed he didn’t want them to thin...
I used to take the back off the telephone and stuff it with ra… and when somebody knocked I wouldn’t answer and if they pers… I’d tell them in terms vulgar
When I awakened it was 1:30 pm. I took a bath, got dressed, checked the mail. A letter from a young man in Glendale. "Dear Mr. Chinaski: I am a young writer and I think that I am a good...
While working Dorsey station I heard some of the old timers needling Big Daddy Greystone about how he’d had to buy a tape recorder in order to learn his schemes. Big Daddy had read the ...
the hearse comes through the room… the beheaded, the disappeared, the… mad. the flies are a glue of sticky pas… their wings will not
by God, I don’t know what to do. they’re so nice to have around. they have a way of playing with the balls