A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us. Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a "passionate madman." Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love--its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

"there is a loneliness in this world so great

that you can see it in the slow movement of

the hands of a clock."