The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

In his lifetime Denis Johnson was far more highly regarded in America than in Britain… This stunning book – bleak, funny tender, despairing and ecstatic (sometimes all at the same time) – decisively proves that the Americans were right. – James Walton * Daily Telegraph *This posthumously published book of short stories is the long-awaited follow-up to Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1992), perhaps the most influential and beloved volume of American short stories of the past three decades… One can say about this book what one narrator says about a collection of poems he loves: “They were the real thing, line after line of the real thing.” – Dwight Garner * New York Times, Critics’ Top Books of 2018 *[W]ith his untimely death, Johnson’s canonisation as an American seer seems inevitable… The five longish pieces comprising this posthumous collection are all, to my mind, quite wonderful. – James Lasdun * Guardian *Now Johnson is dead… we should be sorry to have lost such a wise and compassionate guide to life’s darkness, but thankful to have his magnificent books. Here is another of them. – Chris Power * New Statesman *The prose remains as deliriously alive as ever. In one story there is a rueful, lyrical, lovely paragraph that I hope is more than fictionally true because it suggests that Johnson enjoyed himself producing some of the greatest literary works of our age. – Adam Foulds * Financial Times *

Denis Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, five collections of poetry, two collections of plays and one book of reportage. Among other honours, his novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and Train Dreams was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.