Description

A classic of Twentieth-Century American literature from one of America’s greatest writers.

‘Intense, vicious, and beautiful… Denis Johnson is an exquisite writer’ Mary Gaitskill

Jesus’ Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. It is a record of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by drugs.

In the course of his adventures he meets others who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Out of their bleak, seemingly random lives, Denis Johnson creates modern-day parables of a harsh and devastating beauty.

‘Writing of a ferocious intensity… No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked “insensitivity” in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction’ New York Times

‘The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humour like Denis Johnson’s’ Jonathan Franzen