Denis Johnson
Author
Language
English
Description
"A collection of stories contemplates subjects ranging from old age and mortality to the unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe manifest, depicting haunted characters trying to atone for the past, remember departed loved ones, or come to terms with lifelong obsessions." --
Author
Language
English
Description
"Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a US 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...
Author
Language
English
Description
Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations
5) Train dreams
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
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
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
[1997]
Language
English
Description
The protagonist is Nelson Fairchild, a rich man's son who grows marijuana in California and who has cheated a dealer. If he doesn't settle his debt he will be killed. But the person who holds the purse strings is his wife and she won't give him money, so Fairchild decides to kill her.
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
[2000]
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Pub. Date
1991.
Language
English
Description
Thematically ambitious and written with virtuoso style, this book probes the mysteries of faith, hope, and love in a work of stirring resonance and great beauty--a memorable achievement.es hard-boiled theology and a redeeming wit--the perfect spiritual tonics for tough times".--Kirkus Reviews.
9) The throne of the third heaven of the nations millennium general assembly: poems, collected and new
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date
[1995]
Language
English
Description
"The poems collected in The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly demonstrate anew the rare incantatory power and stylistic virtuosity of Johnson's work. As a writer, he looks away from nothing in experience, and transforms the stuff of everyday life into something vibrant, wonderful, and strange. These are poems of grief and regret, of nightmare and acceptance, of redemption and the possibility of grace. They present...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
[2001]
Language
English
Description
Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world.
And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping...
Author
Publisher
Perennial
Pub. Date
[2002]
Language
English
Description
These two works present a dramatized field guide to some of the more dysfunctional and dysphoric inhabitants of the American West: a sexual-misconduct investigator who misconducts herself sexually; a renegade Jehovah's Witness who supports his splinter Jehovean group by dealing drugs; the Cassandra brothers, their father, and their grandmother, thrown together at a family reunion/wedding/melee at their shabby homestead in Ukiah, California.
12) Jesus' son
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy, and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. Set in the Midwest and West, they are narrated by a young man, an alcoholic and heroin addict, whose dependencies have led him to petty crime, cruelty, betrayal, and various kinds of loss. Many of them are centered around...
14) Fiskadoro
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1985.
Language
English
Description
After the world has been virtually destroyed and the United States consists of only its southernmost reaches, it is the period of the Quarantine, the beginning of a new era for the youth Fiskadoro, Anthony Cheung, and Cheung's one-hundred-year-old grandmother.
17) Fat city
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring — the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger -...
18) Jesus' son
Publisher
Lions Gate Home Entertainment
Pub. Date
2003.
Language
English
Description
A rumpled, hapless young man in his twenties, FH bounces through his days with his dreams and hallucinations blurring and merging into reality. The shaky center of his universe is his beloved on-again, off-again, girlfriend Michelle.
Author
Series
Publisher
Macmillan Audio
Pub. Date
2009
Language
English
Description
American master Denis Johnson's nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America's outcasts and wanderers.
Denis Johnson's now classic story collection Jesus' Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting
20) Hit me
Publisher
Studio Home Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Sonny is a frustrated and lonely bellhop at a lackluster hotel. One night while he is working, he stumbles onto the illicit schemes of the corrupt hotel management. With his new found knowledge and a little prodding from his friend, Sonny becomes involved in a plot that could make him more money than he ever imagined - either that or lose his life.
