Denis Hale Johnson (born 1949) is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus' Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.

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"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.""I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.""I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it.""I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.""I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me.""If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.""If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.""In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts.""What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.""When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.""You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations."

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This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Denis Johnson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

Total Books: 117

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2011 - Train Dreams a Novella (Audio CD) → Paperback
ISBN-13: 9781427213778
ISBN-10: 1427213771
Genre: Literature & Fiction

Currently 2.5/5 Stars.

2009 - Nobody Move (Audio CD) → Paperback, Hardcover
ISBN-13: 9781427206893
ISBN-10: 1427206899
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Currently 2.6/5 Stars.

2009 - Nobody Move (Hardcover) → Paperback, Hardcover, Audio CD
ISBN-13: 9780374222901
ISBN-10: 0374222908
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.

2007 - Tree of Smoke [Audio CD - Unabridged] (Audio CD)
ISBN-13: 9781427202147
ISBN-10: 1427202141
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Currently 2.2/5 Stars.

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Search - List of Books by Denis Johnson

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Poetry collections

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Non-fiction

Search - List of Books by Denis Johnson

Quotes more less

Biography more less

Personal Life more less

Awards more less

Bibliography more less

Poetry collections

Novels

Short story collection

Plays

Non-fiction

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