South of No North (book)
Encyclopedia
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...
by Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
, the so-called "Poet Laureate of Skid Row", originally published in 1973 as South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life by John Martin
John Martin (publisher)
John Martin was the founder of Black Sparrow Press. He was in the book business for 36 years, retiring in 2002. He is most noted for helping to launch the literary career of Charles Bukowski and re-publishing the catalog of John Fante. He sold 650 titles annually, with more than $1 million in...
's Black Sparrow Press. South of No North also is the name of a play that debuted off-Broadway in 2000 based on nine stories from the book.
The book
South of No North contains some of Bukowski's best work. Among the short stories collected in the book are Love for $17.50, about a man named Robert whose infatuation with a mannequin in a junk shop leads him first to buy it, then make love to it, and then eventually fall in love with "her," much to the consternation of his real-life girlfriend; Maja Thurup, about a South American tribesman with an enormous penis who is brought to Los Angeles by the woman anthropologist who has "discovered" him and become his lover; and The Devil is Hot, about an encounter with Old Nick at an amusement pier in Santa Monica, where Scratch himself is caged and on display, fed only peanut butter and dogfood, exploited by a cynical carnie.The collection also features two of Bukowski's finest and most famous short stories: All the Assholes in the World Plus Mine, an autobiographical rumination on the treatment of his hemorrhoids, and Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts. (The latter story originally was published as a chapbook of 500 copies by Bensenville Mimeo Press in 1965.)
The short stories collected in the volume are evocative of Bukowski at his best, when he was one of the premier short story writers still at the top of his talent. The oddness of the subject matter can be explained by the fact that Bukowski's early lack of popularity in the U.S. meant that he wasn't being published in mainstream magazines. Instead, he was part of the "mimeograph revolution" in letters of the 1960s, appearing in mimeographed poetry magazines or chapbooks during the decade, including a magazine he himself published with Neeli Cherry
Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: (born Nelson Cherry, 1945, Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. Cherkovski has resided in San Francisco since 1975 where he is known as a poet and memoirist. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in...
, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns
Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns
Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns was a mimeographed literary magazine published between 1969 and 1971 in Los Angeles, California by Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski . The original title was to be "Laugh Literary and Man the Fucking Guns," but Cherkovski convinced Bukowski to...
from 1969 to 1971[1]. To support himself, he contributed to men's magazines that were in the market for "dirty stories". The latter situation explains the presence of the soft-core pornographic story Stop Staring at My Tits, Mister, an outrageous burlesque of cowboy fiction
Western fiction
Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 1900s and Louis L'Amour from the mid 20th century...
featuring a sex-mad wagon master
Wagon train
A wagon train is a group of wagons traveling together. In the American West, individuals traveling across the plains in covered wagons banded together for mutual assistance, as is reflected in numerous films and television programs about the region, such as Audie Murphy's Tumbleweed and Ward Bond...
named "Black Bart" obsessed with "Honeydew", the amply endowed wife of "The Kid". Black Bart's obsession with Honeydew leads to the inevitable show down with The Kid, with highly unpredictable results reflecting both Bukowski's misanthropic, cynical appreciation of the absurdities of real life. Like fellow 1970s's cult artist-favorite Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
in the media of film, Bukowski in fiction was able to subvert genre fiction with his acerbic world view.
South of No North was followed nearly a decade later by Bukowski's last collection solely devoted to short stories, Hot Water Music, but by then his power as a short story writer was waning . He later admitted that "the short story had deserted me", though he was able to occasionally generate a gem like No Wing High (collected in the 1990 poetry and short story collection Septuagenarian Stew) in his later years.
Index of stories
- Loneliness
- Bop Bop against That Curtain
- You and Your Beer and How Great You Are
- No Way to Paradise
- Politics
- Love for $17.50
- A Couple of Winos
- Maja ThurupMaja Thurup"Maja Thurup" is a short story by Charles Bukowski that is ostensibly about "a South American tribesman with an enormous penis who is brought to Los Angeles by the woman anthropologist who has 'discovered' him and become his lover..."...
- The Killers
- A Man
- Class
- Stop Staring at My Tits, Mister
- Something About a Viet Cong Flag
- You Can't Write a Love Story
- Remember Pearl Harbor?
- Pittsburgh Phil and Co.
- Dr. Nazi
- Christ on Roller Skates
- A Shipping Clerk with a Red Nose
- The Devil Was Hot
- Guts
- Hit Man
- This Is What Killed Dylan Thomas
- No Neck and Bad as Hell
- The Way the Dead Love
- All the Assholes in the World and Mine
- Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
The play
South of No North (Stories of the Buried Life) is the title of a play adapted from nine of Bukowski's short stories by Leo Farley and Jonathan Powers, who also co-directed the play for New York, New York 29th Street Rep29th Street Rep
The 29th Street Rep is a New York, New York-based theatrical company whose productions qualify as Off-Off-Broadway. Founded by actors in April 1988, the 29th Street Rep has staged 78 fully staged productions through 2007...
theatrical company. The individual stories are held together by the framing device of the character of Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
(played by actor Stephen Payne
Stephen Payne
Stephen Payne is the name of:*Stephen Payne , British ship designer*Stephen Payne , American lobbyist...
) in the act of writing. Bukowski (Payne ) comments on the stories, serves as narrator, and occasionally (as in the adaptation of Love for $17.50, which The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
review of September 25, 2000 called the "most notable" of the stories), enters the action.
The unnamed Times reviewer wrote that:
When he and his stories intersect, the results can be revealing, funny and surprisingly theatrical.... This Bukowski is no simple hero of the disenfranchised, and South of No North is most involving when it unfurls this rare psyche through such complex moments, when Bukowski keys into his pathetic characters with frightened identification and amused sympathy. Mr. Payne finds humor and pathos in the role.... Even his narration, with its languorous hold on words even as his sentences round to a close, suggests the writer's intoxication with the life of his mind. It is a rich performance.
Payne also played Bukowski's literary alter-ego, Henry Chinaski
Henry Chinaski
Henry Charles "Hank" Chinaski is the semi-autobiographical protagonist of several works by the American writer Charles Bukowski. He appears in five of Bukowski's novels, a number of his short stories and poems, and the 1987 film Barfly. An author character, Chinaski's biography is largely based on...
, a character of some of the story adaptations, which were more like vignettes. The Times reviewer notes that, "The appeal of these vignettes is spotty, and neither they nor the episodic structure offers much narrative and emotional drive".