Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson. 1992 Farrar Straus Giroux, first edition, signed by the author, 160 pages. Johnson was a novelist and poet who garnered acclaim for his short-story collection Jesus's Son and award-winning novel Tree of Smoke. According to New York Times, "[His] novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose." According to a review in the New York Times for Jesus' Son "DENIS JOHNSON'S "Jesus' Son" is his fifth book of fiction, the previous four being novels with similar preoccupations: loveless promiscuity, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the debilitating effects of parental neglect and the sometimes violent paradoxes inherent in the Christian notions of salvation and self-sacrifice. His prose, especially in this book and in the novels "Angels" and "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man," consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked "insensitivity" in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction."

Condition: VG+, small mark on text block,  signed

"It was so horrible it could only have been a joke."