SOURCE: “A Sordid, Obscene, Violent Underground Los Angeles,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 11, 1983, p. 2.

In the following review, Harper compares Bukowski to Ernest Hemingway and asserts that the stories in Hot Water Music “are imbued with the perverse romanticism of adolescent disillusionment.”

Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller are alive and ill and living in a rented room in East Hollywood—or so one might think after reading this collection of 36 short stories [Hot Water Music]. Sordid, obscene and violent, Bukowski's Los Angeles is more like Miller's Paris than Hemingway's, but our guide through this underworld responds to Hemingway's laconic stoicism, not Miller's apocalyptic rhapsodies.

Bukowski's narrators, who are sometimes “underground” writers like their creator, live in a world of cheap hotels “filled with prostitutes, winos, pickpockets, second-story men, dishwashers, muggers, stranglers and rapists.” The inhabitants of this world are all losers, because “life” is a game...