SOURCE: “News from Elsewhere,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 19, October 5, 1972, p. 21–22.

In the following excerpt, Edwards offers a mixed review of Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.

Charles Bukowski never did escape from California. Certainly he is quite unimaginable anywhere else, and he is still out there on the West Coast, writing poems and stories about his five decades of drinking, screwing, horse-playing, and drifting around, proving defiantly that even at the edge of the abyss language persists. “A legend in his own time,” the cover of his new collection of stories calls him, and that seems fair.

Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is a mixed lot. Bukowski's main market, the underground press and the girlie mags, casts a long shadow here—as he says himself, “To get rid of a story you gotta have fucking, lots of it...