Denis Johnson
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This is the story of Skip Sands--spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly,...
2) Train dreams
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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
From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction.
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly
3) Nobody move
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"Jimmy Luntz, an occasional barbershop quartet singer, is a small-time hood with "a Santa Anita sheet folded up in the pocket of his blinding white tux, " still feeling the itch to bet despite constant disappointment. Anita Desilvera is the embodiment of the femme fatale, ready to play her trump card -- an embezzled stash of $2.3 million -- after becoming "a vagrant, a felon, and a future divorcee" in a single morning. Among those zigzagging through...
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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 marijuana 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...
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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...
8) The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New
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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.
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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...
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Two plays-hilarious and searing in equal measure-by one of our most essential and original authors
In his poetry, short stories, novels, and plays, the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson has explored the story of America-especially of the West, land of self-made men and self-perpetuating myths-with searing honesty and genuine sympathy. These two plays, written in verse at once hypnotic and clear, confirm his position as one of our great...
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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...
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Viajes a los confines del mundo, publicado originalmente en 2001 bajo el título de "Seek", reúne buena parte de los ensayos y reportajes que Johnson publicó en vida, y algunos están entre lo mejor de su obra. Destaca su cobertura de la guerra civil de Liberia, que despliega en "Guerra civil en el infierno" y "El Batallón de los Niños", que abren y cierran este volumen: un desgarrador retrato de un país que se desintegra en un páramo de muerte...
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Authors Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Victor LaValle (The Devil in Silver), Michael Cunningham (The Hours), and Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation) celebrate the 25th anniversary of Denis Johnson's contemporary classic short story collection. Jesus' Son chronicles the grief and transcendence of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls; and inspired the film starring Billy Crudup, Holly Hunter, Denis Leary and Jack Black.