“language of people jammed together, like in the military and prisons,”
May 28, 2017 6:46 PM   Subscribe

Denis Johnson, Who Wrote of the Failed and the Desperate, Dies at 67 [The New York Times] “Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67. The cause was liver cancer, his literary agent Nicole Aragi said.”

• “What a pair of lungs!” : Denis Johnson's Ecstatic American Voice [The New Yorker]
“He liked to play off the edges of genre, spy thrillers, noir, even science fiction—as in his haunting second novel, “Fiskadoro,” which unfolds in a time after nuclear devastation in a place like the Florida Keys. But, whether Johnson was retreading the footsteps of Robert Stone and Graham Greene in the wreckage of Latin American or African revolutions, or of America’s war in Vietnam, or drifting like an unlaid ghost back and forth across the American home front, his fictions rode from book to book on the shoulders of an ever-growing cast of self-dramatizing miscreants—men of schemes and scams, in the grip of unwholesome appetites, brazen but rarely honorable, self-seeking but not self-aware, largely indifferent to cause and effect, defined chiefly by their derelictions and delusions, their missteps and misjudgments, possessed of a seemingly bottomless attraction to bad and violent situations and a limitless capacity for making them worse—in short, men roughly as entertaining on the page as they would surely be repellent in person.”
• Remembering Author Denis Johnson [NPR.org]
“"Denis was one of the great writers of his generation," FSG's president and publisher, Jonathan Galassi, said in a statement Friday. "He wrote prose with the imaginative concentration and empathy of the poet he was." "Brutally honest and painfully beautiful" — that's how novelist Nathan Englander described Johnson's work in 1992's Jesus' Son, a brief, unvarnished set of interwoven stories that focus on the desperate lives of drug addicts."He doesn't ever romanticize these dark settings while leaving his narrator open to the fact that, despite it all, we may live in a heartbreakingly romantic world," Englander wrote of Johnson in 2007, adding: "With dialogue that feels like you're getting it verbatim and stripped-down prose, he writes simple, honest stories that have the bigness of great work."”
• Remembering Denis Johnson [Vulture]
“Johnson’s was the art of compression, of lyrical density, and he’s one of the few prose writers, as John Jeremiah Sullivan once demonstrated in a review for Harper’s, who wrote paragraphs of fiction that could be broken up into lines and stand as poetry. Sullivan was reviewing Tree of Smoke, Johnson’s 2007 Vietnam novel that won the National Book Award. It’s a messy, uneven book with more than its share of theoretical digressions, but you forgive overstuffed novels when half of what they’re stuffed with is brilliance, beginning in Tree of Smoke with the killing of a monkey in a jungle in the Philippines, the sort of overture a writer delivers at the beginning of a novel that will make the reader acquiesce to going wherever the author wants to take us.”
• A brief survey of the short story part 36: Denis Johnson [The Guardian]
“Published in 1992, Jesus' Son is one of the best short story collections of the last 25 years, and its current unavailability in the UK is a joke. Its brief, linked stories take place in 1970s Iowa, Chicago, Seattle, and Phoenix. The narrator, "Fuckhead", is an alcoholic and drug addict. In content, his stories are like those shared at Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where participants are encouraged to talk about past tribulations; there is a freewheeling, mixed-up quality to them. They aren't always arranged in chronological order and might not have happened the way Fuckhead thinks. Some may not have happened at all. Fuckhead's stories are lousy with things gone or going wrong: car crashes, shootings, overdoses, burglaries, abortions.”
posted by Fizz (26 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by Fizz at 6:47 PM on May 28, 2017


Gualala
posted by growabrain at 6:55 PM on May 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


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posted by kneecapped at 7:05 PM on May 28, 2017


I just reread Tree of Smoke, so this was sad news to see.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:28 PM on May 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


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posted by pernoctalian at 8:01 PM on May 28, 2017


His short story "Emergency" is pretty easy to find on podcasts all over the place. The version on the New Yorker fiction podcast (a treasure in and of itself) is the best one.
posted by My Dad at 8:24 PM on May 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


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posted by lalochezia at 8:40 PM on May 28, 2017


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I just got around to reading Fiskadoro in February.

“It isn’t sleeping under the moon that makes a crazy person. It’s waking up and remembering the past and thinking it’s real.”
posted by LeLiLo at 8:59 PM on May 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


I had him for poetry my 1st year at IA and he let the guy who was stalking the star poet of our year( she wasn't in our section; the staff made sure they were separated once they learned what was happening) take over the class, while Denis just sat there.

A few years later when the Sex Pistols called their tour Filthy Lucre I would tell people that was the same reason Denis taught poetry .

Apparently he was more engaged with the fiction students, most of whom are remembering him fondly.
posted by brujita at 10:34 PM on May 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


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posted by From Bklyn at 11:29 PM on May 28, 2017


I love Denis Johnson's poetry more than most things and have, simply by reading his words over and over, memorized much of his work. I so wish I'd sent him the letter I wrote and rewrote in my mind, the one that thanked his for his inspiring, moving words, both his poetry and fiction, that made such a difference in my life. Why do we always think there will be time for such things? He was incredible and I'm so sad he's gone.
posted by but no cigar at 1:21 AM on May 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


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posted by brevator at 6:56 AM on May 29, 2017


I started with The Laughing Monsters which felt like I was reading Graham Greene. Not a complaint, but it was so soaked in that style of writing that it was difficult for me to avoid making comparisons. I need to read Jesus' Son as that is consistently lauded as one of his greatest works. I think now is a good time to dive in.
posted by Fizz at 6:58 AM on May 29, 2017


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posted by spitbull at 8:37 AM on May 29, 2017


I continue to be astonished by the fact that Jesus' Son was made into a movie and not Angels, his debut novel and one of my favorites of all time. I'm not disputing whether or not Jesus' Son was his best book, I just think that Angels has a more cinematic quality than the linked stories of Son. ("Cinematic" isn't meant to be laudatory or pejorative; it's simply a description.)

Prior to publishing fiction, Johnson was a poet, and the language in Angels reflects this. It's remarkable. You should read it.
posted by scratch at 9:16 AM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


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posted by philip-random at 10:07 AM on May 29, 2017


I continue to be astonished by the fact that Jesus' Son was made into a movie and not Angels

I've read the book, but I've never seen the movie; based on the trailer, it looks unwatchable.
posted by My Dad at 11:40 AM on May 29, 2017


I love the Jesus' Son movie. It's a pretty good adaptation that reworks the stories into a longform film format. Johnson has a cameo in it, too.

I was not expecting this one at all. I'm honestly too taken aback to punctuate or quote.
posted by byanyothername at 12:39 PM on May 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


Train Dreams is the work of Johnson's that I've read, but the perfect Thanksgiving afternoon I spent reading it was one of the most pleasant I've had.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:34 PM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


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posted by kozad at 4:47 PM on May 29, 2017


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posted by nightrecordings at 5:28 PM on May 29, 2017


Angels captures the way life can feel like it's totally under your control before you realize that it's almost entirely beyond your control better than anything I've ever read before. "Up the pipe" haunts me.
posted by youthenrage at 8:40 PM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


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Tree of Smoke. Go read it.
posted by oneironaut at 10:00 PM on May 29, 2017


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posted by benzenedream at 10:43 PM on May 29, 2017


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posted by Bob Regular at 4:59 AM on May 30, 2017


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posted by hap_hazard at 10:36 PM on June 1, 2017


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