The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Johnson, Denis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178733063X ISBN 13: 9781787330634

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2018

**A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF 2018**

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson, author of the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Jesus’ Son. Written in the same luminous prose, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating mortality, the ghosts of the past, and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves.

Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

Review:

"In his lifetime Denis Johnson was far more highly regarded in America than in Britain... This stunning book – bleak, funny tender, despairing and ecstatic (sometimes all at the same time) – decisively proves that the Americans were right." (James Walton Daily Telegraph)

"This posthumously published book of short stories is the long-awaited follow-up to Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1992), perhaps the most influential and beloved volume of American short stories of the past three decades... One can say about this book what one narrator says about a collection of poems he loves: “They were the real thing, line after line of the real thing.”" (Dwight Garner New York Times, Critics' Top Books of 2018)

"[W]ith his untimely death, Johnson’s canonisation as an American seer seems inevitable... The five longish pieces comprising this posthumous collection are all, to my mind, quite wonderful." (James Lasdun Guardian)

"Now Johnson is dead... we should be sorry to have lost such a wise and compassionate guide to life's darkness, but thankful to have his magnificent books. Here is another of them." (Chris Power New Statesman)

"The prose remains as deliriously alive as ever. In one story there is a rueful, lyrical, lovely paragraph that I hope is more than fictionally true because it suggests that Johnson enjoyed himself producing some of the greatest literary works of our age." (Adam Foulds Financial Times)

"Ranging from hard-edged to thoughtful, the engaging tales in this posthumous collection offer one voice crying out from rehab and another parsing the bonds of prison life." (Jeffrey Burke Mail on Sunday)

"He worked at a level different from the rest of us – a true master." (Zadie Smith)

"The God I want to believe in has a voice and sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s." (Jonathan Franzen)

"Our most poetic short story writer since Hemingway." (George Saunders)

"The great energy of his imagination was a fusion of honesty and seriousness, pain and laughter. His life was a thing of moment and urgency, pure and undistracted." (Marilynne Robinson)

Book Description:

Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson.