Synopses & Reviews
Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life, 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 the Vine, a bar in an Iowa town where the narrator meets his friends and forms alliances "based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light."
In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.
Review
"These tales are told with...a kind of grinding realism which would suggest that these events are as purposeless as they seem. But at heart Johnson is a metaphysician, and through the luminous windows that startlingly open in the deadpan prose..." Madison Smartt Bell, USA Today
Review
"Johnson has the distinction of being both a poet and a novelist of gritty realism who uses language like a paring knofe to slice through to the bones of his subject matter....[These stories] are as muscular and tight as a washboard stomach, as resonant as a drum." People
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"[Johnson] is doing something deeply new in these stories, and the formal novelty brings us into a new intimacy with the violence that is rising around us in this country like the killing waters of a flood." Atlantic Monthly
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"A work of spare beauty and almost religious intensity." Entertainment Weekly
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"[F]or the most part the stories are neurasthenic, as though Johnson hopes the shock value of characters fatally overdosing in the presence of lovers and friends will substitute for creativity and hard work from him." Publishers Weekly
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"Reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious." Marianne Wiggins, The Nation
About the Author
Denis Johnson is the author of The Name of the World, Already Dead, Jesus' Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.
Table of Contents
Car Crash While Hitchhiking 3
Two Men 15
Out on Bail 35
Dundun 45
Work 55
Emergency 69
Dirty Wedding 91
The Other Man 105
Happy Hour 117
Steady Hands at Seattle General 129
Beverly Home 137