Denis Johnson

A tale originally serialized in Playboy is a darkly comic tribute to the American crime novel and is set in Bakersfield, California, where an assortment of unscrupulous characters engages in a cat-and-mouse game over a multimillion-dollar claim. By the National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke.

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...

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me. This is the story of Skip Sands-spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong-and...

"A literary spy thriller set in Africa, where an intelligence agent is caught up in a get rich quick scheme"--

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...