Praise for "Tree of Smoke"
"Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and "Tree of Smoke" is a tremendous book . . . It ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century." --Jim Lewis, "The New York Times"

Praise for "Train Dreams"

"[A] severely lovely tale . . . The visionary, miraculous element in Johnson's deceptively tough realism makes beautiful appearances in this book. The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism; the natural world of the American West is examined, logged, and frequently transfigured. I started reading 'Train Dreams' with hoarded suspicion, and gradually gave it all away, in admiration of the story's unaffected tact and honesty . . . Any writer can use simple prose to describe the raising of a cabin or the cutting down of tress, but only very good writers can use that prose to build a sense of an entire community, andn

Denis Johnson is the author of eight novels, one novella, one book of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His novel "Tree of Smoke" won the 2007 National Book Award.�