Books like Hot Water Music
Short stories of drunks, failed writers, gamblers and the women who put up with them, set in the bars, racetracks and cheap apartments of Bukowski's Los Angeles.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Hot Water Music
Women
A down-and-out poet in Los Angeles navigates a series of women, bars, and hangovers in Bukowski's autobiographical novel about surviving desire.
Sex and Rage
Jacaranda Leven, a surfer and party girl who drifts through Los Angeles at the end of the 1970s, starts writing seriously and moves to New York, and has to decide what she will give up to keep going.
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Forty-three stories drawn from Lucia Berlin's own life: cleaning houses in Berkeley, working in emergency rooms and a prison, growing up in mining towns and in Chile, raising four sons.
The Glass Canoe
Life inside the Southern Cross, a working-class pub in Sydney, told in short episodes by Meat Man, one of its regulars.
Junky
Burroughs's first book, a flat, exact account of a heroin user's life in 1940s New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, told by a man who has learned everything about the drug except how to stop.
Perfume & Pain
Astrid Dahl, a lesbian novelist cancelled after a West Hollywood bookstore event, retreats to her Sapphic Scribes writing group, tries to give up pills and drink, and falls for nearly every woman in her orbit while her agent waits for the next book.
The Rum Diary
In 1958, Paul Kemp, a young freelance journalist, takes a job at a failing English-language newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and drinks, brawls and drifts towards trouble, in Thompson's early autobiographical novel.
The Informers
Linked stories of rich, numbed Los Angeles in the early 1980s, in which students, parents, studio executives, a rock star and a pair of vampires drift through cocaine, sunshine and emotional vacancy.
Less Than Zero
A college student returns to 1980s Los Angeles and drifts through a world of cocaine, parties, and moral emptiness.
A Country Doctor's Notebook
Stories drawn from Bulgakov's year as a newly qualified doctor at a remote country hospital, where he faces amputations, difficult births and blizzards with only his textbooks, and finds the diary of a colleague who fell into morphine addiction.
Pulp
Bukowski's alter ego takes a pulp-fiction detective job, blurring the line between literary fiction and dime-store noir.
Eve's Hollywood
Babitz's first book, a collection of short pieces on growing up in Hollywood, from Hollywood High to the rock clubs of the Sunset Strip, by someone who thinks Los Angeles is the best place on earth.