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Factotum
- Narrated by: Christian Baskous
- Length: 5 hrs and 8 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.
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Hope is one of life’s greatest miracles. The human ability to hold onto belief in the possibility of a better scenario, even when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is truly phenomenal. It’s easy to understand why so many writers have featured hope in their works, and why hope continues to inspire us. Whether you’re up against a challenge or just looking for inspiration, these quotes about hope can help you find your faith. Here we’ve gathered the most inspirational quotes from some of our favorite audiobooks.
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A striking red-head, 20-something Jody is attacked and transformed into a vampire while walking home one night in downtown San Francisco. Befriending 19-year-old Tommy, Jody tries to understand her new undead life, but trouble finds her when the cops start suspecting Tommy of being a local bloodsucking serial killer.
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Bloodsucking FUN!
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Nine Lives
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Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.
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Do not miss if you're interested in New Orleans
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Black Wings Has My Angel
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A legend among noir buffs, Chaze's long-lost pulp classic is the dreamlike tale of a man after a jailbreak who meets up with the woman of his dreams - and his nightmares.
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Guilt..... a deadly emotion !!
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After the First Death
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It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why, before the police do.
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The 42nd Parallel
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This first entry in John Dos Passos's celebrated U.S.A. trilogy paints a grand picture of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century.
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Powerful document of an all-too-familiar past
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The men in the tan-and-cream Chrysler came with guns blazing. When Ray Kelly woke up in the hospital, it was a month later, he was missing an eye, and his father was dead. Then things started to get bad. From the mind of the incomparable Donald E. Westlake comes a devastating story of betrayal and revenge, an exploration of the limits of family loyalty and how far a man will go when everything he loves is taken from him.
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Numbers mean violence
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The Switch
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Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara hit it off in prison, where they were both doing time for grand theft auto. Now that they're out, they're joining forces for one big score. The plan is to kidnap the wife of a wealthy Detroit developer and hold her for ransom. But they didn't figure the lowlife husband wouldn't want his lady back. So it's time for Plan B and the opportunity to make a real killing - with the unlikely help of a beautiful, ticked-off housewife who's hungry for a large helping of sweet revenge.
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Annoying reader
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Flood
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Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her - so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.
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Noir!
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Time Out of Joint
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Ragle Gumm has a unique job: Every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn’t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that’s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he’s never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand".
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Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-15
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Vulgar - yes.
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Choke
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Victor Mancini, a medical school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: He pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him.
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Oh please, not another abridged!!!
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Haunted
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Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.
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True Horror -- Not for the faint of heart, stomach
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What listeners say about Factotum
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Enjoyable
I read this in print probably 15 years ago. Now that the Bukowski books are on audible, I am revisiting all they have to offer. If you are starting off on Bukowski, I'd suggest Ham on Rye or Post office over this. This novel details many years of Bukowski's life, I'd figure after leaving home, in which he worked about a thousand different jobs in a hundred different cities. As per his style, the chapters are short. There's no filler. It's all, "I moved here, I got drunk at this bar, I hooked up with this woman." Factotum is one of his better novels, but not his best. Still, it flows and is an easy listen.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Kyle Milligan
- 05-23-16
Third Bukowski book
I've read Bukowski's first three books and this is by far my favorite. The raspy voice doing the performance was fitting as well. Enjoyed this audio version immensely.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Laura L Rodriguez
- 12-17-13
I could listen to this over and over again
Any additional comments?
I'm now obsessed w/Charles Bukowski! The story is raw, dirty, and beaten down....I could not get enough.
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8 people found this helpful
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- trying HARD to be a MINIMALIST
- 07-30-20
Loved It
Absolutely loved the book. The narrator could not have done a greater job. I was laughing thru the entire book.
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4 people found this helpful
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- michael hernandez
- 06-19-14
Not My Cup of Tea
Couldn't handle the narration, it was just irritating to listen to the narrators voice. I like Bukowski, but this books narration made it impossible to listen to. Couldn't get through this one.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Stephan Badyna
- 10-23-19
Fantastic
Definitely one of my favorite books by Bukowski, 2nd only to Post Office. If you like his work, you can't skip this one.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Dirty Dream Catcher
- 10-22-19
Buk makes me happy
and listening to Christian Baskous perform the reading is just like having Buk in your ear.
no one makes me laugh like Bukowski!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Andrew Kumar
- 02-05-19
Awesome narration to a mediocre novel
The actual story was a complete mess and borderline non-existent. It was interesting in parts, but the overall story was simply variants on the theme of a vulgar drunk who likes sex. I preferred Post Office to this, it at least had a basic storyline.
However, the narrator is perfect.
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- Jeff
- 09-15-17
Love the book but hated the performance.
The book is one of Bukowski's great works. The performance by the narrator ruins a lot of the humor and general mood. He uses cartoony voices for characters and bad accents. Most of the ladies are given a voice that sounds like a guy doing a homosexual male's voice. The pages still drip with seediness, darkness, and truth. But it's hard to get past the narration. I'd recommend just reading this one.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Jefferson
- 08-06-22
Working, Drinking, & Loving in Seedy WWII-era USA
Factotum (1975) is a short novel told in a series of short chapters that provide a sardonic, amusing, and morbidly fascinating look at down and out life in World War Two era American cities like New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and especially Los Angeles, as Charles Bukowski's young alter-ego Henry (Hank) Chinaski travels around by train or bus (without being able to sleep or defecate) and half-heartedly interviews for, miraculously gets, and promptly quits or is fired from a series of demeaning, “dull stupid jobs” with grotesque overseers and coworkers.
A factotum is someone who does all kinds of work, and Henry is a newspaper gopher, subway poster remover and applier, auto parts store clerk, dog biscuit factory oven worker, women’s dresses shipping clerk, potential libretto writer, bakery coconut man, hotel loading dock worker, fluorescent light fixture shipping clerk, art supply store shipping clerk, LA Times janitor, potential Yellow Cab driver, and more. Typically, after several days he rubs his bosses or coworkers the wrong way for his perceived superior attitude, when it's really only that he doesn't like people (“I was a man who thrived on solitude”) or tires of whatever soul-destroying work he happens to be doing (“I was horrified by life and by what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed”) or succumbs to wanderlust (“Packing was always a good time”). All the while he is living in a series of seedy apartments, while drinking constantly and turning out scores of hand-written short stories that he sends off to literary magazines, almost going through the motions but never quite giving up the idea that he is a hitherto undiscovered “writer”--which might be part of his self-directed irony: “Baby, I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.”
Because of his views on work, Henry would rather stay in bed and drink. He also does plenty of drinking away from home, of course, as once with an old friend when he wakes up in jail arrested for having caused a traffic jam without remembering any of the details. He spends as little time as possible with his weak and soft mother and his unpleasant father, who says things like, “My son is a God damn no good drunk” and “How the hell are you going to make it?” and charges him rent and clothes washing fees to stay in their home. Interestingly, he only masturbates when he's in his family home. He is not immune from considering getting a gun and putting himself out of his misery. He’s often attracted to and occasionally lucky (?) with members of the opposite sex. He listens to classical music on the radio, and the likes of Mahler and Beethoven perform the soundtrack for some funky filthy sex and debauchery and conflict. I sense a homophobic vibe, as Bukowski shows Henry turning down a couple offers of sex from creepy men and dryly remark that his sudden spate of apartment cleaning must be due to his “turning fag.”
Bukowski writes memorable lines, about--
--charisma:
“I always started a job with the feeling that I would soon quit or be fired and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.”
--romance:
“Great lovers were always men of leisure. I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of time clocks.”
--human nature:
“For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter totter.”
He is a master of the vivid grotesque description, like:
“The people swarmed up out of the subway, like insects, faceless, mad. They rushed upon me and into and around me with much intensity. They spun and pushed each other. They made horrible sounds.”
And
“I was given instruction by a toothless elf with a film over his left eye. The film was white and green with spidery blue lines.”
And
“The large bed was covered with stuffed animals. All of the animals looked surprised and stared at me.”
The audiobook reader, Christian Baskus, is the ideal Bukowski/Chinaski, perfect.
The novel ends with Henry out of work, out of love, and alone, impotently taking in a vigorous strip tease act: “I couldn't get it up.” Rather than closure, it feels like Bukowski just decided to stop his tenuously linked series of work and love anecdotes. There isn’t a clear climax and resolution to the novel so much as a petering out. Nonetheless, I can’t help it: I want to read more!
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