Charles Bukowski's raw, darkly comic first novel follows Henry Chinaski, a working-class drifter who takes a job with the U.S. Postal Service and discovers that steady work can be its own brutal kind of chaos. Told in Bukowski's blunt, unsentimental style, the novel captures the grind of dead-end labor, hard drinking, and the struggle to keep some sense of self intact in a world built to wear people down.