Books by Denis Johnson
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English
review 1: I thoroughly enjoyed The Laughing Monsters a fast jagged novel about mercenaries plotting and selling information in Sierra Leone, Uganda and the Congo. Nobody writes terse , tough guy dialogue like Johnson. His shorter novels seem to combine Raymond Chandler with Joseph Conrad a...
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English
review 1: I really enjoyed this novel and was impressed with its compactness. A man's whole life (and half a century of the history of the American west) are stuffed into just 116 pages due to Johnson's spare, evocative language and ability to pick out the moments in his character's life t...
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English
review 1: Elmore Leonard has made a career of writing great novels featuring really nasty characters. He specializes in losers, hucksters, cons, shysters, deadbeats, and thugs of all types. As repulsive as his leading characters often are, the reader is usually able to find enough redeem...
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English
review 1: Joy Williams recently published a review in the NYTBR in which she related an anecdote about the woman seated next to her on an airplane who groused that Denis Johnson doesn't like his characters very much -- right before her kid spilled orange juice on both Williams and herself....
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English
review 1: As a small child he arrived on a train and later would not have a clear understanding of where he came from or what his background was. For a time, as an adult he would make a living from trains, clearing the trees so more tracks could be laid, a necessity as more and more people...
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English
review 1: This book could have been a lot of things, but it ended up just being a plate unseasoned chicken.As far as the concept goes, I liked it. I liked the characters and I liked the settings. I liked the way the situations played out. I liked more or less every individual piece of thi...