The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Reviews

“These four stories rank with Johnson’s best work, but the title story, a catalogue of singular moments related by a man who tells us he’s passing through life as if it were a masquerade, ranks with the best fiction published by any American writer during this short century.”—New York

“A posthumous masterpiece . . . With this book, Johnson has only cemented his status as one of his generation’s greatest writers. . . . Each story in Largesse is weighted by an astonishing humanity, a generosity of spirit that’s evened out by lyrical dissections of time’s passage and the mysteries of connection. . . . Here’s an author turning toward the past, conjuring up the ghosts of those he’s loved and lost, writing of wild experiences with affectionate abandon. Few have linked themselves between the reader and the page so intimately—so cosmically—as he does here.”—Entertainment Weekly

“An instant classic.”—Newsday

“Exceptional luminosity . . . hits a powerful vein.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Grace and oblivion are inextricably yoked in these transcendent stories, the testament of a writer who lived and worked on unusually close terms with death, until that great mystery finally stole him. . . . [Johnson’s] gift is to extract the beauty in all that brokenness. . . . Though these are longer, fuller, rangier stories than the strobing fever dreams of Jesus’ Son, they possess the same incredible emotional density. They feel squeezed, to borrow Johnson’s phrase, ‘in the almighty grip of the truth.’”—The Wall Street Journal

“Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson. Nobody ever came close . . . We're just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world's greatest writers.”—NPR

“Johnson offers visions and sadness and laughter. But it’s the sentences—those adamantine, poetic sentences—that made him one of America’s great and lasting writers. It’s the sentences that live on.”—The Boston Globe

“Johnson’s fiction . . . overflows with creative energy, moving from one beauty to another with a mercurial, at times almost chaotic grace. Although his characters are often diminished and winnowed by their struggles with life, the narrative voice that describes their travails gives evidence of an imagination that is nearly boundless in its generosity and abundance.”—Chicago Tribune

“Sly, open-ended, and meticulously wise . . . Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are necessarily deeper, and more precise. . . . [Johnson] is a writer whose ambitions were in their own way as broad and burgeoning as Dostoyevsky’s. He is for all time.”—Rachel Kushner, Bookforum

“A final gift from a master.”—BOMB Magazine

“Denis Johnson’s posthumous collection winks from beyond the grave. . . . Johnson told aspiring authors to write as if ink were blood, because it is precious. So are farewells like this. . . . It is a vital addition to Johnson’s oeuvre.”—Time Expand reviews