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Ham on Rye
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Classics
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Post Office
- A Novel
- Written by: Charles Bukowski
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers.
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Great, funny and well performed. Classic bukowski.
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Factotum
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- Length: 5 hrs and 8 mins
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One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.
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A great road trip book.
- By Delyn on 2021-04-26
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Women
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- Written by: Charles Bukowski
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Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at 50, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.
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women
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Pulp
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Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.
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Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, returns, revelling in his eternal penchant for booze, women, and horse-racing as he makes the precarious journey from poet to screenwriter. Based on Bukowski's experiences when working on the film Barfly, the absurdity and egotism of the film industry are laid bare in this deadpan, touching, and funny glimpse into the endless negotiations and back-stabbings of la-la land. Hollywood is an irreverent jaunt that serves up the beating heart of Hollywood with razor-sharp humour.
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Post Office
- A Novel
- Written by: Charles Bukowski
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers.
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Great, funny and well performed. Classic bukowski.
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Written by: Charles Bukowski
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Factotum
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- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 5 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.
-
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A great road trip book.
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Written by: Charles Bukowski
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Women
- A Novel
- Written by: Charles Bukowski
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at 50, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.
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women
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Written by: Charles Bukowski
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Pulp
- Written by: Charles Bukowski
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.
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Overall
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Bukowski's mad immortal origins, surfaced from the literary underground, have addicted legions of audiences who've recognized Bukowski as one of America's greatest realist writers and poets. Audible Studios narrator and OBIE winner Will Patton ( Remember the Titans, The Good Wife, Armageddon) gives a tour de force performance of Bukowski's greatest work in his prime.
Written by: Charles Bukowski, and others
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson rocked the literary world with his mind-bending style of Gonzo journalism. First published in 1966, Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s up-close and personal look at the infamous motorcycle gang during the time when its moniker was most feared.
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The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pulitzer Prize-winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter". His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures.
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Best narration I’ve ever experienced
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Publisher's Summary
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years, and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Greg Kuzmich
- 2021-08-05
Crack open a cheap beer and listen
Ham on Rye is like a surly, mean and drunk version of the Christmas Story or Sandlot
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- Anonymous User
- 2019-03-09
Christian Baskous brings this essential Bukowski book to life
This book is a great intro to Bukowski, unflinching, unapologetic, it traces his path through childhood to young adult through the character of Henry Cinaski early years. The narrative is brisk. The humour is dark, blunt, at times to the point of nihilistic. I definitely had some good hard laughs. Christian Baskous is great. He brings the book and the characters to life. This was a good and entertaining listen. Not for the faint of heart.
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- Parola138
- 2013-12-09
Thoroughly enjoyed this
This is a favorite book that I read maybe fifteen years ago. I was very pleased to read this and other Bukowski titles are now available on Audible. Some of Bukowski's books don't hold up when I revisit them years later, however Ham on Rye is the exception. It is a very blunt, honest tale of fierce aloneness, being anti-social and a struggle to grapple with the madness of the world around him. This book, I don't think, is intended to be funny but I laugh out loud so many times while reading it. At first I wasn't sure how I felt about the narrator, but he grew on me. I don't think I could listen to him narrate any other book, but it fits Bukowski so that after a while you actually feel like its Bukowski reading it to you. I guarantee that you'll never read another book like this. In fact, I feel like it actually gets better as it progresses into the second half. Most books are the opposite. I also recommend Factotum by Bukowski. The beauty in these books is that none of them are very long. I wish they would put some of his poetry into audible like Love is a Dog From Hell or You Get so Alone Sometimes.
70 people found this helpful
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- james
- 2018-02-01
4.64 stars........ Bukowski keeps it real.
I laughed more listening to this audiobook than all other audiobooks I've heard combined. This is one of the top performances I've heard, and I've heard some really good ones. Christian Baskous is the perfect narrator to read Bukowski's work. I rarely, if ever, literally laugh out loud while listening to an audiobook. This performance caused me to laugh out loud multiple times. The humor is as crude as it comes, so if you are easily offended or do not like foul language, stay away from Ham on Rye. If this type humor is something you enjoy, download this book. The performance is top notch, and while the story isn't a fast paced one, there's always something going on. Be warned: Ham on Rye is rude and crude and socially unacceptable. I loved it.
Overall rating: 4.64 stars
57 people found this helpful
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- Joe Kraus
- 2018-04-10
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Loser
I have a vivid memory of discovering Bukowski’s poetry: the poem “Tough Customers” in the volume Play the Piano Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed in the ‘poetry closet’ at Denison University’s library in the summer of 1983. It was an amazing moment, one that opened up for me new possibilities for writing and reading literature. I’ve never found my way to his prose, though. If I started Barfly, I know I didn’t finish it, and he has remained only a poet for me ever since.
This one, though, is worth the wait, even if I am coming to it 35 years late.
Ham on Rye opens with Bukowski’s seemingly autobiographical protagonist, Henry Chinaski, age two, sitting beneath a table and watching the legs of the adults go past. It ends with him gazing uncertainly at the rock-‘em, sock-‘em-robot-like game where his toy boxer has been knocked down for the count by a kid across the way. In between, he resents the world, grows into an ungainly body, and gets into more fights than I can count. Along the way, he tallies up reasons to hate himself, then he more or less shrugs them all off and settles into drinking, reading literature, and drinking some more.
If the arc of the narrative sounds flat, what makes this memorable is Bukowski’s nonjudgmental recording of the world around him. He is, in many ways, a camera, telling us what he sees and sometimes what he feels but never applying philosophy to it. The kids and adults of his world often do cruel things to one another, but he doesn’t spend time assessing others or himself. Life isn’t particularly generous in his case. He has a mean, insecure father and a weak-willed mother. He is awkward as a child and then, just as he finds his strength, he develops what the doctors call the worst case of “acne vulgaris” they’ve ever seen, and he has to deal with the almost disfiguring condition. He’d love to get laid, but he knows it won’t happen.
So, if there’s any drama here, it’s the slow-motion way in which Henry becomes accustomed to himself and to a world that seems always to tantalize him. He’s never going to get what he wants, but he develops a model of masculinity where he’s OK with deprivation. He sees himself as one of life’s losers, as someone destined for skid row, but he refuses to complain and he refuses to take comfort in anything metaphysical. He’s always interested in the world around him, not necessarily in its people, but in the substance of the things he encounters.
As a fan of his poetry, I enjoy that stance because it explains to me how he could write the unsentimental things he did. He’s willing to draw portraits of the forgotten people, the bums or the prostitutes or the alcoholics just this side of developing tuberculosis, but he isn’t interested in celebrating them. His greatness (a limited greatness, I think, but a memorable one) comes in his being so tempted to despair but never giving in. As close to bored as he is with his succession of failures, he can never quite suppress his interest in what makes people – including himself – tick.
It might be nice if there were a clearer structure here, and, for once, I’d be interested in seeing something that presents itself more clearly as a sequel or continuation, but I still admire this for what it is. It’s a fragmented, fractured work about a man whose life is a trail of disappointment. Somehow, throughout it, he never gets too low or too high. He just keeps his word-camera running and shows us a world few others have the combination of misfortune, strength, and fundamental humanity to share without moralizing.
42 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Julia McBride
- 2020-03-12
Terrible and absolutely pointless.
The writer is wretched and the reader is terrible. Don't waste your time. It's about a sad meaningless life and terrible people.
39 people found this helpful
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- Alison
- 2013-08-15
Portrait of the Artist as a Brutalized Child
What did you love best about Ham on Rye?
I love the ugly truth of it. It is a stark description of a time and place in American history that rings true in every line. Some of it is shocking, some of it perilously ennervating, sometimes both at the same time. If you are at all familiar with Bukowski's work, you will love this narrative version because it IS Bukowski. Mr. Baskous's narrative is studied and perfect, capturing the crude as well as the lyrical parts of the novel in what I imagine would be just as Bukowski would have wanted it (though I a pretty sure, knowing what I know about Bukowski, he would have complained).
What did you like best about this story?
The ugly truth of it. It is timeless in its description of despair of the modern world coupled with tiny lights of joy and happiness that extinguish almost the minute they take light. Nobody does it better than Bukowski.
Have you listened to any of Christian Baskous’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I have listened to and really loved some of his other work. I think this series of Bukowski novels will showcase Mr. Baskous's particular talents more than the other work he has done. Mr. Baskous has a feel for this kind of writing, a genuine understanding of its importance and its grace and I look forward to listening to the rest of the series. He knocks this one out of the park, essentially. A truly excellent work of art.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Light and Dark in LA
Any additional comments?
If you have the guts and the time, buy this audiobook but don't try to listen in your car on the way to your day job. Wait until it is dark and you can listen without interruption.
25 people found this helpful
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- Hickupnorth
- 2019-11-01
Pass the caffeine please...(yawn)..
I really wanted to listen to this book after I read the description. But from the first 10 words I heard, I realized there was no way I could stand to listen to this narrator. I turned up the speed to see if that helped....nope. He sounds like he 1.) just woke up from a night out partying, 2.) hates his job but has to perform to pay the bills, 3.) is reading this book for the first time!...I highly do not recommend. I tried to push through...but ended up exchanging it after listening for about an hour.
19 people found this helpful
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- sue
- 2020-03-29
engaging yet disturbing
It's so American of me to have continued turning pages in hopes of some kind of redemption for the autobiographical main character, but, I think he's really just a nasty a-hole.
18 people found this helpful
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- Kevin
- 2014-08-18
**6 Stars!**
Where does Ham on Rye rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
#1
What did you like best about this story?
The candidness of the author
What about Christian Baskous’s performance did you like?
So good I imagined I was listening to Bukowski read the story himself.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The overall writing style was what captured me. I could tell that Bukowski was influenced by Hemingway.
13 people found this helpful
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- Chris C
- 2014-12-22
incredible book, great recording
why did I wait so long to check out bukowski, incredible talent and amazing mind. so visceral and raw I felt like I was right there the whole way through.
12 people found this helpful
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- Wayne
- 2020-08-24
Really Audible, this is a classic? Not even close!
Well, the narration is excellent. Other than that HAM ON RYE is utterly without redeeming value. I listened to the entire book and now I need to take a shower.
6 people found this helpful