Here’s why: “Jesus’ Son” revolutionized my sense of what books can do and how they work. He was a true triple threat, a “writer’s writer’s writer” whose work was also widely celebrated. “Jesus’ Son” is still the first book that I recommend to my fiction students - it’s on the syllabus for my advanced fiction workshop at Boston College this semester, for example - and the book I go back to when I’m lost in my own work. I came to love that book so much, in fact, that I owned multiple copies: a “home copy” and a water-buckled spine-creased “road copy,” which I carried around with me like a talisman - or, more accurately, a sort of permission slip to be a fiction writer. I did - I bought the book, read it that day, reread it the next day, and probably went back to it every day for the year that followed. “And check out a book called ‘Jesus’ Son,’ by Denis Johnson,” he added. William Flesch, who introduced me to everything from “Paradise Lost” to “Blade Runner” - during office hours and asked him to recommend some interesting contemporary fiction. I first discovered Johnson in 1994, as a sophomore at Brandeis University, when I met with my favorite English professor - Dr. For me, it’s also an attempt to repay an immense debt of gratitude. I’m sure it’ll be a bittersweet event - a chance to recognize a great new book of fiction, but also to acknowledge the passing of one of our most important authors.

19, I’ll join writers Mona Awad, Jeff Parker, Heidi Pitlor and Stuart Nadler to celebrate Johnson’s work and the release of his last new book at Newtonville Books. Johnson, who died last May at 67, was my first literary hero, the writer who first made me want to write. It’s easy work,” reflects a character in “Triumph Over the Grave,” a story in Denis Johnson’s just-published posthumous collection, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.” “It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky … the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.” (Courtesy Random House)

(Courtesy Cindy Lee Johnson) This article is more than 5 years old.

Jesus son short stories