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Stories (Picador Modern Classics, 3)
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 lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. It was adapted into a critically-praised film in 1999.
"Reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious." ―The Nation
"A work of spare beauty and almost religious intensity." ―Entertainment Weekly
"Ferocious intensity... . No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked 'insensitivity' in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction." ―The New York Times Book Review
This information about Jesus' Son was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He holds a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and has received many awards including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction in (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986) and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams. He is best known for his collection of short stories, Jesus' Son.
His first published writing was a collection of poetry, The Man Among The Seals, published in 1969 when he was 20 years old and enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he was mentored by Raymond Carver. At 21 he was first admitted to a psychiatry ward for alcohol addiction, having started a lengthy love affair with substance abuse at the age of 14 ...
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