Jesus' Son News

Photo: Cindy Johnson/Courtesy of FSG At last, Playboy is sexy again! Novelist Denis Johnson - whose magnum opus Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award last year and whose Jesus' Son is a minor masterpiece - ...

Book by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday. Donald Ray Pollock's debut collection of stories has some obvious antecedents: the trailer park realism of Raymond Carver and the comic Faulkner of the Snopes cycle, maybe ...

The series in which we investigate the Semitic qualities of someone in the news Hollywood star Jack Black is appearing in two new movies this month. via The Jewish Chronicle

Tuesday, February 5, 2008; Posted: 11:54 AM - by BWW News Desk Evenstar Films will present free staged readings of Des Moines , a new play by acclaimed author Denis Johnson, winner of the 2007 National Book ... via BroadwayWorld.com Featured Content

In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude. via Write it like disaster

“Now you have to see this thing.”

Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo are currently presenting Everything Has Been Arranged , a play based on Denis Johnson's story "Small Boys' Unit" from Seek , the 2002 non-fiction collection. via KQED Arts

Last book I bought: "Jesus' Son: Stories" by Denis Johnson Book I'm reading: "The Best American Short Stories 2006" edited by Ann Patchett Total number of books I own: Never counted. via Variety

" American author Denis Johnson won the National Book Award for fiction Wednesday, November 14, for his Tree of Smoke, a novel about the Vietnam War. via VietNamNet

“I'm very sorry to miss this one chance to dress up in a tuxedo in front of so many representatives in the world of literature, and say thank you to the people who have given me my life”

Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke," a 600-page journey through the physical, moral and spiritual extremes of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, won the National Book Award for fiction Wednesday night. via Forbes

“Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed”

Nothing sinister, mind you. It's just that once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there. via Atlantic Monthly

Head to Woodhull this weekend for a taste of something different, when Coffee Bean Theatre puts on the first local dinner theater production in several years. via Register-Mail

“When the balance tips too far, you jump on the teeter-totter - ' on my side, incidentally.”

Denis Johnson has given us so many maimed and suffering souls in the past 25 years, he could fill a trauma ward. via The Phoenix

“I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars...I am sullied.”

Frank Rich's column yesterday begins and ends with a suicide. The first is that of Charles D. Riecher, the Air Force's second-highest procurement officer, who killed himself two weeks after a Washington Post ... via New Republic

“Right where it turns into a dream.”

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson : If this novel, Johnson's first in nearly a decade, is-as the promo copy says-about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, ... via Zmetro.com

“I don't know what they said to one another. She walked down the steps, and Wayne followed.... She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty. I guessed Wayne was the storm that had stranded her here.”

Denis Johnson's first and only book of stories, Jesus' Son , was a classic the moment it appeared in 1992--this was immediately clear to anyone who read it. via The Nation

“And another: every cock fights best on his own dunghill.”

SMOKIN': Denis Johnson's latest novel is a winner info Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pages, $27 If you have ever wondered what it feels like to die by poisonous blow-dart, Denis ... via Creative Loafing

Is the Sarkozy Marriage On the Rocks? , by Stefan Simons in Der Spiegel . Cecilia Sarkozy has raised eyebrows for not appearing in public very often with her husband, French President Nicolas Sarkozy. via Foreign Policy