To Arthur Seaton, key worker on a lathe in a Nottingham cycle factory, life is one long battle with authority. You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman. And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure.

He is a warrior of the bottle and the bedroom - his slogan is 'If it's going, it's for me' - for his aim is to cheat the world before it can cheat him. And never is the battle more fiercely joined than on Saturday night.

But Sunday morning is the time of reckoning, the time for facing up to life - the time, too, you run the risk of getting hooked! Arthur is no exception.

With his characteristic raw and minimalist style, Charles Bukowski takes us on a walk through his side of town in Hot Water Music. He gives us little vignettes of depravity and lasciviousness, bite-sized pieces of what is both beautiful and grotesque.

The stories in Hot Water Music dash around the worst parts of town – a motel room stinking of sick, a decrepit apartment housing a perpetually arguing couple, a bar tended by a skeleton – and depict the darkest parts of human existence. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement.

In the way he writes about sex, relationships, writing, and inebriation, Bukowski sets the bar for irreverent art – his work inhabits the basest part of the mind and the most extreme absurdity of the everyday.