Description
Book SynopsisA classic of Twentieth-Century American literature from one of America's greatest writers. 'Intense, vicious, and beautiful... Denis Johnson is an exquisite writer' Mary Gaitskill Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. It is a record of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by drugs. In the course of his adventures he meets others who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Out of their bleak, seemingly random lives, Denis Johnson creates modern-day parables of a harsh and devastating beauty. 'Writing of a ferocious intensity... No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked "insensitivity" in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction' New York Times 'The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humour like Denis Johnson's' Jonathan Franzen
Trade ReviewTruly extraordinary -- Marc Lambert, Books of the Year * Scotland on Sunday *
The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humour like Denis Johnson's -- Jonathan Franzen
Denis Johnson is inspired, in the truest sense of that once-potent, even dangerous word. * LA Times *
Writing of a ferocious intensity ... No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked "insensitivity" in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction. -- James McManus * New York Times *
Intense, vicious, and beautiful ... Denis Johnson is an exquisite writer -- Mary Gaitskill
Modern-day parables that glow with a strange, radioactive light -- Michiko Kakutani * The New York Times *
A distinctive turn in the history of the form * Atlantic Monthly *
A mini masterpiece * Sunday Times *
Johnson is probably the best writer of English prose around... It's all delivered with an astonishing beauty -- David Flusfeder * Metro *
