SOURCE: “LA Low-life,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 29, 1974, p. 1336.

In the following review of Life and Death in the Charity Ward, Feaver praises the humor and intensity of the stories in the collection.

In the sonsobitches school of writing you talk as you speak, but more so. Short sentences. Expletives. “Oh shit, oh shit”, your characters say nearly every time they achieve climax. Life is a balling, boozing, brawling merry-go-round and the tears show through the vomiting. Charles Bukowski treads the streets and pads of Los Angeles where many others trod before him: Philip Marlowe, for one, and the Kerouac crowd when they weren't in San Francisco or on the road. He writes evidently from experience, tightened up. His way of life veers between the campus poetry-reading and the charity ward where things reach bottom. It consists of shocking the folks one side of the tracks, letting rip...