Denis Johnson Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Angels (1983)
  2. Fiskadoro (1985)
  3. The Stars at Noon (1986)
  4. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1990)
  5. Already Dead (1997)
  6. The Name of the World (2000)
  7. Tree of Smoke (2004)
  8. Nobody Move (2009)
  9. The Laughing Monsters (2014)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. Shoppers (2002)
  2. Soul of a Who*re and Purvis (2012)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Train Dreams (2002)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Veil (1987)
  2. Jesus’ Son (1992)
  3. The Incognito Lounge (1994)
  4. The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly (1995)
  5. The Man Among the SealsInner Weather (2017)
  6. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018)
  7. Car Crash While Hitchhiking and Emergency (2020)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Seek (2001)

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Denis Johnson Books Overview

Angels

The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson’s novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays a runaway wife toting along two kids and Bill Houston ex Navy man, ex husband, ex con on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind shattering surprise. Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America’s dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.

Fiskadoro

Hailed by the New York Times as ‘wildly ambitious’ and ‘the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, ‘The Wasteland,’ Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones,’ Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all too possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

The Stars at Noon

Set in Nicaragua in 1984, The Stars at Noon is a story of passion, fear, and betrayal told in the voice of an American woman whose mission in Central America is as shadowy as her surroundings. Is she a reporter for an American magazine as she sometimes claims, or a contact person for Eyes of Peace? And who is the rough English businessman with whom she becomes involved? As the two foreigners become entangled in increasingly sinister plots, Denis Johnson masterfully dramatizes a powerful vision of spiritual bereavement and corruption.

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Leonard English, a sad and intense young man recovering from a suicide attempt, moves to the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown to work as a disk jockey private detective. On his first day there, he encounters a beautiful young woman and falls desperately in love with her only to find out she prefers those of her own sex to men. English’s first assignment, a search for an elusive artist, proves equally frustrating. As winter lengthens and Leonard’s anguish mounts, his desperate quests for the artist, for love, for redemption take on an increasingly apocalyptic coloring.

Already Dead

A contemporary noir, Already Dead is the tangled story of Nelson Fairchild Jr., disenfranchised scion to a northern California land fortune. A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he’s attempted to pull off. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable mari*juana patch hidden in the lush old growth redwoods on the family land. Nelson has some serious problems. His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce. What’s more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90,000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Now Lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. Desperate, terrified and alone, for Nelson, there may be only one way out. This is Denis Johnson’s biggest and most complex book to date, and it perfectly showcases his signature themes of fate, redemption and the unraveling of the fabric of today’s society. Already Dead, with its masterful narrative of overlapping and entwined stories, will further fuel the acclaim that surrounds one of today’s most fascinating writers.

The Name of the World

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 position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life he’s a dead man walking.

Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, ‘I’m speaking as I’d speak of a change in the earth’s climate, or the recent war.’

Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced ‘to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. ‘ Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, ‘by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror,’ he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth.

Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Tree of Smoke

Winner of the National Book Award

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon. com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor…
.

Tree of Smoke is the story of William ‘Skip’ Sands, CIA–engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong–and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is ‘bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.’

Nobody Move

Jimmy Luntz is an innocent man, more or less. He’s just leaving a barbershop chorus contest in Bakersfield, California, thinking about placing a few bets at the track, when he gets picked up by a thug named Gambol and his life takes a calamitous turn. Turns out Jimmy owes Gambol’s boss significant money, and Gambol’s been known to do serious harm to his charges. Soon enough a gun comes out, and Jimmy’s on the run. While in hiding he meets up with a vengeful, often drunk bombshell named Anita, and the two of them go on the lam together, attracting every kind of trouble. The latest from National Book Award winning author Denis Johnson, Nobody Move ‘does exactly what noir should do propel the reader downhill, with its cast of losers, louts and toughs as they cheat, shoot, and exploit one another into fast talking oblivion’ Jess Walker, The Boston Globe. Denis Johnson is the author of six novels, three collections of poetry, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke was the 2007 winner of the National Book Award. He lives in northern Idaho. From the National Book Award winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a provocative thriller set in the American West. Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat and mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres the American crime novel but with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson’s own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best. ‘Johnson is one of the last of the hard core American realist writers, working in his own way along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime all his novels have it in one form or an other in relation to the nature of grace yes, grace and the wider historical and cosmic order…
Johnson is a great writer, and even a casual entertainment, written well, has meaning. If Tree of Smoke intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq was a huge piece of work, a Guernica of sorts, then Nobody Move is a Warhol soup can, a flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed.’ David Means, The New York Times Book Review ‘Hot on the heels of his National Book Award winning novel, Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson by far one of our best writers has written what might seem like a side step: a short, tight crime noir, produced under deadline as a serial for Playboy magazine. Like so many contemporary crime narratives Pulp Fiction comes instantly to mind, Johnson s new novel, Nobody Move, keeps a narrow focus, homing in on the plight of Jimmy Luntz, a barbershop chorus singer, compulsive gambler and Steve Buscemi type who owes money to a guy named Ernest Gambol, who collects for a guy a dealer of some sort named Juarez…
To give much more of the plot away would be to betray this hugely enjoyable, fast moving novel…
One senses that Johnson took great pleasure in writing on a deadline, keeping the story tight to the bone, honing his sentences down to the same kind of utilitarian purity he demonstrated in Tree of Smoke. His descriptive passages and they are few and far between show his poetic mastery…
Johnson is one of the last of the hard core American realist writers, working in his own way along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime all his novels have it in one form or an other in relation to the nature of grace yes, grace and the wider historical and cosmic order. So how does Nobody Move fit into his oeuvre? As Susan Sontag might say, it seems to operate as a flight from interpretation, settling into the genre for a ride, looking away from the wider implications of the world to enjoy itself by unfolding action within a neatly closed universe. But something more is at hand, because Johnson is a great writer, and even a casual entertainment, written well, has meaning. If Tree of Smoke intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq was a huge piece of work, a Guernica of sorts, then Nobody Move is a Warhol soup can, a flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed. It opens with the line ‘Jimmy Luntz had never been to war,’ and it closes with two characters near a river. All of its symbols if you want to take a shot at finding deeper meaning are in your face and seem to be saying, at least to me, that for the most part, most of us live within the status quo, one way or another, just trying to locate the next move.’ David Means, The New York Times Book Review ‘So noir it s almost pitch black, this follow up to Johnson s National Book Award winning Tree of Smoke concerns a lovable loser named Luntz barbershop chorus member, Hawaiian shirt wearer, and inveterate gambler who is in debt to an underworld bad guy. ‘My idea of a health trip is switching to menthols and getting a tan,’ he tells Anita Desilvera, a beautiful Native American woman whom he beds after a boozy night out, and who has bad guys of her own to escape. Against a desolate Western background of shantytowns and trailer parks, the pair s story plays out largely according to the genre s dictates, with wisecrack laden dialogue and evenly dispersed cliffhangers that are a legacy of the work s genesis as a serialization in Playboy. But there are also moments of arresting lyrical beauty a river s swollen surface under a crescent moon ‘resembled the unquiet belly of a living thing you could step onto and walk across.” The New Yorker ‘Jimmy Luntz has got to be the first protagonist in noir history to begin his blood soaked descent singing in a men’s choir. Jimmy’s pipes are only the first clue that Nobody Move isn’t your run of the mill, bullet hole jacketed crime novel. Instead, this fast, funny diversion is protean writer Denis Johnson’s sly follow up to his Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke, winner of the 2007 National Book Award. It can be dicey for a literary lion to wander into the crime genre. Adhere to form and the author risks condescending or producing a faint copy of something disposable; subvert those conventions and the result is often flat, a thriller with no thrills. As if that balance weren’t tricky enough, Johnson chose to write Nobody Move as a four part serial for Playboy magazine. Well, as his Iraq War distracted characters might say: Mission accomplished. Nobody Move does exactly what noir should do propel the reader downhill, with its cast of losers, louts, and toughs as they cheat, shoot, and exploit one another into fast talking oblivion. Yet there’s a playful tilt, a humane rendering of its dark characters, and a relentless buzz in the sentences that recalls Jesus’ Son, Johnson’s tight little classic of fractured junkie transcendence. Johnson’s smartest move is to avoid the overplotting that infects many contemporary crime novels. Yes, every permutation has seemingly been done, every villain imagined, every plot turn played. So rather than invent some unlikely premise or gin the game with eye rolling twists, Johnson simply gives us one guy Luntz who owes another guy Juarez money, so that a third guy Gambol is sent to dispatch the first guy…
Johnson is marvelously fluent in noir. His short, quick lines hum with caustic humor and an awareness of what he’s writing: a rain storm produces ‘ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy,’ a motel is ‘made of fake logs and cheap in its soul.” Jess Walter, The Boston Globe ‘Johnson’s latest, a burning shot of neonoir titled Nobody Move, distills its hero’s knack for doing the wrong thing and runs with it. The novel opens as Jimmy Luntz competitive choir singer, gambling addict and all around shady guy gets picked up in Bakersfield, California, by Gambol, a Cadillac driving thug who has been dispatched to collect money or break a bone or two. Jimmy manages to shoot but not kill Gambol, and then goes on the lam. He soon meets Anita, a lush who is in the process of robbing her corrupt ex husband of millions. Together, they try to stay alive amid ambushes, torture sessions and gunfire. It’s bracing to experience this wisecracking and sexy novel’s speed, the ways that Jimmy bumbles his way directly into mayhem. But compared with Johnson’s previous work, Nobody Move has little aftertaste. There’s none of Jesus’ Son’s creepy drug euphoria or spiritual back draft. As a palate cleansing riff on Dashiell Hammett, it’s great.’ Michael Miller, Time Out Chicago ‘A sly take on California crime noir fiction.’ Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post Gazette’Having won the National Book Award for 2007 s fever dreamed Tree of Smoke, former Texas State professor Denis Johnson does a 180 with Nobody Move, a slim but engaging caper novel. Where his previous effort was literarily complex and fraught wit…

Shoppers

‘Perfection is not the basis of what I’m talking about,’ says a member of the Cassandra family, which forms the center of Denis Johnson’s plays, Hellhound on My Trail and Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames. The character could be speaking for his creator, because human imperfection is one of Denis Johnson’s specialties in his critically acclaimed novels, short stories, and nonfiction, and, now, in two brilliant new plays. 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 and their father and their grandmother, thrown together at a family reunion/wedding/melee at their shabby homestead in Ukiah, California. When Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames was performed in San Francisco in 2001, the Chronicle said, There’s an enormous appeal in Johnson’s bleak comic vision of a semi mythic American West. That appeal derives from the author’s perfect vision of imperfection, embodied with such energy and courage in these marvelous pieces of theatre.

Train Dreams

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 Denis Johnson s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders the new novella by the National Book Award winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

Jesus’ Son

Jesus’ Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and trancendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost an dfound and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson’s prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth century American literature.

The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly

From the award winning poet and novelist a must have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

Seek

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 it, anything at all is possible.

Whether traveling through war ravaged Liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation’s militia groups, or attempting to unearth his inner resources while mining for gold in the wilds of Alaska, Johnson writes with a mixture of humility and humorous candor that is everywhere present.

With the breathtaking and often haunting lyricism for which his work is renowned, Johnson considers in these pieces our need for transcendence. And, as readers of his previous work know, Johnson’s path to consecration frequently requires a limning of the darkest abyss. If the path to knowledge lies in experience, Seek is a fascinating record of Johnson’s profoundly moving pilgrimage.

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