"American literature suffered a serious loss with Johnson's death. These final stories underscore what we'll miss."
A posthumous collection of stories from Johnson (The Laughing Monsters, 2014), graceful and death-stalked as his work ever was.
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"Johnson offers no new lessons about how dehumanizing post-9/11 lawlessness can be, but his antihero's story is an intriguing metaphor for it."
And for his next trick, Johnson delivers a taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he's shadowing in Africa.
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"As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word."
Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq.
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"A new wrinkle on the overworked contemporary theme of lives lived on the edge, and one of Johnson's most interesting books."
A traumatized widower is painfully and gradually recalled to life in this deceptively simple—and surprisingly absorbing—short novel by the well-known poet and author (Already Dead, 1997, etc.).
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"Johnson's attempt at a noir epic intermittently excites and teases, but doesn't satisfy."
A kinky jeremiad about drug culture burnout (and fallout), powered by amusingly feverish images of California-as-Armageddon, from the poet and author whose recent fiction includes Jesus' Son (1992) and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991).
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"Blunt and gritty: Johnson's beautifully damned stories sing with divine poetry, all the while bludgeoning us with existential reality."
Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991; Fiskadoro, 1985 etc.) brings together eleven down-and-out stories linked by their disagreeable narrator—a lowlife of mythic proportions who abuses drugs, booze, and people with reckless indifference.
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Poet and novelist Johnson (The Stars at Noon, 1986, etc.) further elaborates his disorienting vision of a cracked world in this unnerving and edgy novel—a very hip sort of postmodern Catholic fiction that keeps you off-balance with all its genre-blending and gender-bending.
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