This story is honest and real. Nothing fantastic or amazing happens to our hero, he doesn't learn any life lessons and he doesn't undergo any changes. This is simply the world as he lives through it, surviving the endless and thankless work of a postman. It's funny and cynical, but not sweet or heartfelt. It's real life as told by a drunken nobody who doesn't seek to be anybody by the narrator of his own story.

For me, I enjoyed reading something very down to earth in these times of celebrity worship, plastic idols and absolute pretension. I have ordered all the Bukowski novels after finishing this one.

After reading this book, I don't think I will ever be able to look at a Postal Employee the same way. Bukowski weaves together an assortment of stories that are very likely taken from his own life experiences and creates a whole that is humorous and at times terribly depressing.

I can't say much about this book that hasn't already been said, but this book is great as a piece of "I hate my job" fiction as well as an overall captivating read about someone who can never quite escape the life they seem bound to live.

Definitely worth a purchase, this one is a fast page-turner and is also a piece of work you will be able to come back to many times in the future.

Bukowski earned himself a special place in American literature with the publication of this short, tersely written tragicomedy about Henry Chinaski, a drunken womanizer who joins the postal service. Bukowski is able to carry on the tradition of a self-consciously imposed Hemingwayesque masculinity, without being overly derivative. Bukowski's landscape is modern day LA, and his strength as a writer here is in his ability to evoke the excitement of the spontaneity his life must have contained. His characters and scenarios capture the wearisome bureaucracy of modern-day American life without being pedantic or polemical; Bukowski's prose is always breezy, humorous, and strong. Perhaps the novel's only weak section is the series of constructed messages delivered by the Postal-Service to Chinaski, demonstrating his negligence and alcoholism. A more experienced novelist would have clipped this section down. Nevertheless, Post Office is an enjoyable read, not a provocative statement like Hunter S. Thompson's `Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,' it actually reminds you of Thompson's first novel, `The Rum Diary,' though Bukowski's character and command with the typewriter was stronger as a beginner than the latter.

Bukowski has great images of the the downtrodden and the lowlife that is systematically created in this country but at least part of his insight of the miserable was his own choice. It gets old after awhile and sophomoronic - the drinking and the scumbag humanity and so forth. I see this everyday. One gets the feeling that being a victim is all the world has to offer reading bukowski. He offers no anecdotes that i see other than confirming a lot of the morbid state of the world. One book starts to sound like the next and the next.

I read this book in a matter of hours, one afternoon in one sitting. Not only is it a highly entertaining and funny account of a postal worker, but it contains many glaring truths of the American bureaucratic system that is the U.S. Postal Service. I cannot say anything more to emphasize how great this book is! You will merely have to read it for yourself.