The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2018-01-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812988647

Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times • Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air • Chicago Tribune • Newsday • New York • AV Club • Publishers Weekly “Ranks with the best fiction published by any American writer during this short century.”—New York “A posthumous masterpiece.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The Boston Globe • New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Bloomberg The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come. Praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden “An instant classic.”—Newsday “Exceptional luminosity . . . hits a powerful vein.”—The New York Times Book Review “Grace and oblivion are inextricably yoked in these transcendent stories. . . . [Johnson’s] gift is to extract the beauty in all that brokenness.”—The Wall Street Journal “Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson. Nobody ever came close. . . . We’re just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world’s greatest writers.”—NPR

Jesus' Son

Jesus' Son
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2009-02-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 031242874X

Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.

Fiskadoro

Fiskadoro
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1995-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780060976095

Hailed by the New York Times as "wildly ambitious" and "the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Wasteland,' Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones," Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

The Laughing Monsters

The Laughing Monsters
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374709238

Denis Johnson's New York Times bestseller, The Laughing Monsters, is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game. Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago. Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.

Nobody Move

Nobody Move
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429959711

From the National Book Award–winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a provocative thriller set in the American West. Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat-and-mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres—the American crime novel—but with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson's own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1991-03-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466807059

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is Denis Johnson's most fully realized novel to date, an enthralling and shattering reading experience, which probes the mysteries of faith, hope and love.

The Stars at Noon

The Stars at Noon
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593469771

A literary thriller and love story set during the Nicaraguan revolution, from the National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. • Now the basis for a major motion picture Set in Nicaragua in 1984, The Stars at Noon is a story of passion, fear, and betrayal told in the voice of an American woman whose mission in Central America is as shadowy as her surroundings. Is she a reporter for an American magazine, as she sometimes claims, or a contact person for the anti-war group Eyes of Peace? And who is the rough English businessman she begins an affair with? The two foreigners become entangled in sinister plots and ever-widening webs of corruption, until a desperate attempt to escape the country brings their relationship to a crisis point. With his customary narrative brilliance, award-winning writer Denis Johnson brings a hellish landscape of moral ambiguity vividly to life.

The Name of the World

The Name of the World
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2009-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061869392

The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war." Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Train Dreams

Train Dreams
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2011-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429995203

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011 From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.