Exotic and sensuous

Luminous

It is hard to imagine the literary landscape without Angela Carter. Hers is a legacy that extends way beyond the bounds of her own work

I can't think of anyone who is at that pitch of intellectual commentary, fictional experimentation and fullness of expression. I'm not a patch on her. Jesus, I wish I was

Its autobiographical stories set in Japan, where she had gone to live with a Japanese lover, give off a direct and poignant emotion. They show her changing, too

Daringly and dangerously erotic, exploring the dark recesses of female sexuality

Still remarkable for their darkly allusive imagery...this collection displays the same slightly chilling morality as her early novels

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

Our most poetic short story writer since Hemingway.

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.

Prose of amazing power and stylishness.

When Denis Johnson is justly praised for his voice, I always think, just the one? He has an eerie symphony at his command.

Denis Johnson was and is and will continue to be one of our strongest writers. His work has an indigenous beat that marks it as unmistakably American.

Denis Johnson was and is, without question, significant and great.

Everyone who reads Denis Johnson comes away thinking he has spoken directly to some wracked and ragged, yet transcendent, aspect of their own secret heart.

His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity.

Nobody wrote with more brutality and mercy, more hilarity and grace. What a genius he was.

[Denis Johnson’s] writing is life enhancing, like being suddenly hit by a marvellous trick of the light. I urge you to read this. I can’t imagine anyone with any kind of sensitivity to words or people not enjoying it.

Blistering, brilliant.

A true American artist ... a revelator for this still new century.

A dizzying mix of humour and near tragedy that leaves us unsure whether to laugh or weep… For too long, Denis Johnson was not sufficiently appreciated. A fine novelist and poet, as well as one of the best short story writers of his generation.

An instant classic…A masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose…. It's filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty—often all three—into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold onto life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope.

Like a good rock song, a typical Denis Johnson sentence describes, with total precision, what an emotion feels like … Johnson has sometimes been compared to Ernest Hemingway for his creation of a distinctive American idiom.

Denis Johnson was the best American writer of the past twenty-five years.

He was the kind of writer who comes along once in a generation, if that often: a true original, in the same league as Melville and Whitman.

Here are stories that feel generously improvised but never haphazard, uncanny but earthy, reconciled to the passing of time but themselves out of time. Few books so relentlessly concerned with death feel so relentlessly alive.

Denis Johnson writes short stories like no one has ever done before. He makes the normal electric; the everyday enormous. There is not a single word here that does not hit you square in the face and say: look, this is what it's about, this is what you need to know.

Denis Johnson’s stories are astonishing… they dash between quicksilver wit and gallows humour, twinning the superficial with the profound so elegantly. His sentences are exquisite, often having the capacity to sock a sudden punch. The last story made me gasp.

[An] absorbing collection of deceptively rambling, craftily casual tales ... Magical stuff.

Sometimes streetwise and tough, and always informal, light, elegant and miraculously tender.

The late Denis Johnson is arguably the most influential American prose writer of the last thirty years ... and in the posthumously published The Largess of the Sea Maiden it is blindingly clear why.

The five darkly comic stories that comprise The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are befitting final testaments to [Johnson’s] wild originality... His sentences, like his plots, are full of gorgeous little shocks.