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)
Well, I'm tickled to death to announce that - many years and thousands of lives later - I have launched a paperback edition of my second least loved book of all time, the story collection.... (read more)
Author (and high school janitor, and Iowa Writer's Workshop graduate and teacher) Thom Jones has died. He was the best writer of short fiction in the entire history of the world. You have never heard of him.... (read more)
No, I don't mean the Saturday that's Ian McEwan's novel, though it's really rather good and you should probably read that, though not at the expense of reading Atonement, which is just amazingly good.... (read more)
