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Stories
by Denis Johnson
Book Reviewed by:Twenty-five years after Jesus' Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on aging, mortality, and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. It follows the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Jesus' Son. Written in the same luminous prose, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating old age, mortality, the ghosts of the past, and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson's death in May 2017, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.
By the time of his death in 2017, Denis Johnson had long been acknowledged as a contemporary master of the short story, worthy of comparison to latter-day luminaries such as Alice Munro, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis. From his 1992 breakthrough collection, Jesus' Son, to his late-career novels, Tree of Smoke and Train Dreams, he'd succeeded in enchanting — and disturbing — a whole generation of book-lovers with his bleak, beautiful tales of life at the ragged edges of America. Reading The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, it is hard not to suspect that Johnson's stories will continue to haunt many more generations to come...continued
Full Review
(533 words)
(Reviewed by Jamie Samson).
"Strangler Bob", one of the more memorable stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is set entirely within the squalid confines of an American prison. As far as we know, Johnson himself never spent any time in jail; the story is a testament to the power of imagination shorn of experience.
Throughout history though, there have been many great authors who, due to bad behavior or bad luck, haven't had to rely solely on their imaginations in order to describe prison life. Some of these figures, like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Voltaire, were victims of backward social conditions or repressive regimes (what we would now call "prisoners of conscience"). Others, such as the Marquis de Sade, and his twentieth-century successor, ...
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