Jesus' Son : Stories by

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Summary: One of the best Contemperary Short Story Writers
Review: I loved every minute of this riviting story- which in essence is a bunch of short stories strewn together. bravo.

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Summary: Don't Believe the Hype
Review: It seems to me that the more ugly, grotesque, and hopeless your work is, the more people will praise you, call you a genius, and hand over their money to you. Denis Johnson is no exception here. Even though he can put a good line together once in a while, the praise surrounding his work is a lot of overblown hype and his stories lack any depth. I was attracted to this book because I'd read that Johnsonwas similiar to Thom Jones but is nowhere close to Jones's work. The "dark side" of life is only interesting for so long, and only if there's some meaning behind it, even though the privleged middle class seemsto be obsessed with probing the depths of this from their secure suburban lifestyles. Isn't there enough disposable literature out there today?

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Summary: Deserves to sell more copies than Trainspotting!
Review: This is the best book ever written by a man or a woman! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

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Summary: An American Oddysey
Review: A collection of thematically linked short stories is often the goal of young writers, especially writing program writers; apparently there's something appealing about saying your collection is "meant to be read as a novel"--i.e., even if you are not able to write a sustained work of fiction, even if you're capable of writing only sound bites, you can still qualify as a novelist if you write a lot of sound bites about the same thing and give them separate titles. See, for instance, anything by Sandra Cisneros. Johnson has produced something altogether different. These stories are less stories than visions, and the resulting collection is less a pseudo- or quasi-novel than an epic--albeit a diffuse, fragmented epic with many of the battles and escapades forgotten or omitted. The overriding question that begins each new story is, "How did he get there?" That fragmentation is at the heart of the book and makes the experience similar to listening to Bob Dylan's 1974 album, "Blood on the Tracks." Fuckhead's experiences are as frightening, spiritual, and desperate as those of Dylan's narrator in such songs as "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Shelter From the Storm." Johnson gives us a new kind of poetry, a new kind of prose, a new way of story-telling, and a new way of putting it all together in "Jesus' Son."

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Summary: Drugs in the form of book
Review: How do write a prescient narrator, drug-induced hallucinations, about the wandering imperative that ruins some of us for any regular job that lasts more than two months? Grab a handful of the doctor's best stuff and see what it does to you, that's what Johnson's prose is like, but good stuff, taut, poetry for those who want to rush. You can read these stories in an hour or two. Then you can read them again, again. Don't stop. Forget what a mess life is? Here it is, in perfect concentration, stories that haunt because they hurt, do they ever hurt

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Summary: Johnson a master of the short-story
Review: Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" is a wonderful collection of short stories that contains two masterpieces of short fiction: "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" and "Emergency." Other memorable stories in this selection are "Dirty Wedding" and Beverly Home." While it is rumored that the former head of the Stegner creative writing program at Stanford, has said that Johnson's work does not qualify as "moral fiction," such criticism is irrelevant. While I have no idea what Johnson's background is besides his also being a poet, let me assure you, Johnson is not one of the creative writing school guys and gals churning out boring mood pieces for Masters of Fine Arts dissertations. While this work would not qualify as transgressive fiction and lies just a needle-length to the east of the "South of No North" of Charles Bukowski, there is the rawness and vitality of real life here, of the alky, the junky, of the fuck-up, the part-time pervert, of the loser that is really quite wonderful in that it has clearly been earned and is honestly observed. Johnson's dialogue is superb; check out the exchanges in "Emergency" for a primer on how to write dialogue truly. Not only is Johnson's dialogue true in the sense of it capturing the rythms of the way people speak, it brilliantly evokes their inner state of mind by revealing their evasions. And, being a poet, Johnson has an impressive command of metaphor that is never false. Wonderful writing. Don't take my word for it: Johnson is the only writer volunteered by Saul Bellow himself as worth reading in his recent "Playboy" interview

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Summary: great book
Review: This book is one of the finest collections of short stories published in the second half of the 20th century

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Summary: A long, moody bus ride of a book.
Review: These are the stories like Raymond Carver would write if he had this kind of vision and gift with words. Johnson is a poet, turned prose writer. His novel, Fiskadoro, is a feat of imagination; he conceives a new, post-apocalypse world and he invents a new vocabulary and syntax to go with it. This collection of short stories is even better. And don't sniff at the title--Jesus' Son--these stories are entirely legitimate. Most were published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, or Esquire. Several were selected for the "Best Short Stories of..," where I first came across them. The character are low, mostly drunks, addicts, and users. The setting is the west, Seattle or Tuscon. A lot of the tales begin, and end, at the Vine, a dive bar downtown. In the story Work, two friends earn their drinking money by pulling the copper wire out of an abandoned house; not a burglary, one points out, but a salvage job. They watch in amazement from the attic as a woman skis by,nude,her red-hair streaming behind her. It may be a dream, one character suspects, but its turning out to be one of the best days of his life. In another story, a young man hides in the bushes to spy on a young house wife as she showers. He admits how low this is, but he expect to go lower. He returns every day of the summer, hoping to catch the woman and her husband in the act. He sees something entirely different. Emergency is my favorite of the collection. A man walks into the hospital with a knife in his eye socket,lodged there by his wife. An orderly, stoned after indiscriminately sampling the hospital's pharamcopia,casually removes the knife while the frantic surgeons are still scrubbing. Driving around later with a friend, they run over a pregnant rabbit. "We killed the mother, but saved the babies," one rejoices. They get lost in a snow storm, and find themselves at an empty drive-in, the speakers all squawking. Not all the stories are this grim or bleak. And even at their blackest, they are funny. Mostly they are visionary, and beautiful. But its a dilated vision, over real and harsh. If "Leaving Las Vegas" left you cold, so will this collection. Reading Johnson feels like a visit to an acupunturist; he chooses his words precisely, like needles, to stir dead feelings and revive your imagination.

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Summary: A luminous, rawly conscious collection of short stories
Review: Johnson's style is a masterpiece of mystic concision. This stories have the hair-raising immediacy of Baudelaire or rock music. A cult favorite among writers and readers. Topics? Doing drugs, love, the meaning of life--the good stuff.

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Summary: COMPLETLY BLOWN AWAY
Review: Simply put: this is genius!!! It's not a book for people who loved The Fountainhead. It's a book for people who understand simplicity and depression. This book is honest to the core, and the movie adaptaion, although obviously different, is worth getting into as well. I have never read anything like this, expect perhaps Nate Powell's illustrated novel entitled "Tiny Giants".