Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920. He came with his family to the U.S. when he was three years old. Among his forty-five books of poetry and prose are the novels Post Office, Ham on Rye, Women, Hollywood and Pulp. Bent Hamer's new film, Factotum, is based on the novel by Bukowski. World-premiering at the Cannes Festival last year, the movie is released this spring by IFC.

Imagine a world where motorcycles drive themselves, robots conduct symphony orchestras and an animal’s thought patterns can move a robot. These ideas sound like projections into the distant future, but they are more like headlines from tomorrow’s newspapers. And they are at the center of a new sci-fi fantasy, I, Robot, directed by Alex Proyas, an expert filmmaker of dark sagas like The Crow and Dark City

I was driving cross-country with my dog Lucy, listening to Christian radio and clocking the My Mommy Chose Lies billboards on my speedometer, when I received a short story from my friend Jon Raymond called “Old Joy,” a minimalist story of friendship that captured all the feeling of loss and alienation that everyone in my world seemed to be grappling with. Mark and Kurts relationship was, among other things, a great metaphor for the self-satisfied, ineffectualness of the Left.