Denis Johnson died last year - the third of my three favourite American fiction writers to fall, after David Foster Wallace and Thom Jones. I always described Johnson as "the best American fiction writer you've never heard of" - though that stopped being quite so true after he won the National Book Award in 2007. Now he's left us a last gift, a posthumous, second, and final collection of short fiction. Even in death, he can still write sentences like this one. And I'm not sure anyone else can - or ever will.... (read more)
So I just read the new Denis Johnson, which follows up his National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke. I'm sure a lot of people will remember me going on about Johnson - his novel Already Dead, A California Gothic has long been my second favourite novel of all time.... (read more)
Since the periodicity of my long-running quotations series has been getting asymptotic with infinity, here are the quotes that have been piling up since the last edition... (read more)
