Tree of Smoke (First Edition)

Denis Johnson

ISBN 10: 0374279128 / ISBN 13: 9780374279127

Published by Farrar Straus Giroux (New York), 2007

About this Item

FSG, New York, 2007. First edition. First printing. Hardbound. A pristine unread copy, purchased new and never opened, very fine/very fine in all respects. This book quickly went through multiple printings. This is the first printing with full number line down to the 1. Comes with archival-quality dust jacket cover. Shipped in well padded box. You cannot find a better copy. The time frame of the novel is from 1963 to 1970, with a coda set in 1983. One of the novel's protagonists is Bill Houston, who was the main character in Johnson's 1983 debut novel Angels. Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Norman Rush, in The New York Review of Books, said: "Tree of Smoke is an ambitious, long, dense, daunting novel sited at the heart of a great American evil, the Vietnam War . Like the war itself, Tree of Smoke delivers an intense experience of loss, shame, futility, confusion all without benefit of editorializing.".

Seller Inventory # 1107-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Tree of Smoke (First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (New York)
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374279128
• ISBN 13: 9780374279127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Vietnam
  • Vietnam War

About this title

Synopsis

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me.

This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.

Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.

Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of five novels, a collection of poetry and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.