South of No North (short Story Collection) - 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, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns from 1969 to 1971. 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 featuring a sex-mad wagon master 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 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.