Turns out jimmy owes gambol's boss significant money, and Gambol's been known to do serious harm to his charges. Jimmy luntz is an innocent man, more or less. He's just leaving a barbershop chorus contest in Bakersfield, California, thinking about placing a few bets at the track, when he gets picked up by a thug named Gambol and his life takes a calamitous turn.

Soon enough a gun comes out, and Jimmy's on the run. While in hiding he meets up with a vengeful, often-drunk bombshell named Anita, and the two of them go on the lam together, attracting every kind of trouble. From the national book award-winning author denis johnson comes nobody Move: "does exactly what noir should do--propel the reader downhill, with its cast of losers, louts and toughs as they cheat, and exploit one another into fast-talking oblivion" Jess Walker, shoot, The Boston Globe.

.

Angels: A Novel

The most critically acclaimed, and first, of denis johnson's novels, ex-husband, ex-con -- on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, Angels puts Jamie Mays -- a runaway wife toting along two kids -- and Bill Houston -- ex-Navy man, wild ride cross country. Denis johnson, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, known for his portraits of America's dispossessed, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.

Their tickets may say phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise. Driven by restless souls, jamie and bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, bad booze, fascinating, and desperate needs, and dangerous fringe of American life.

.

Already Dead: A California Gothic

Already dead, with its masterful narrative of overlapping and entwined stories, will further fuel the acclaim that surrounds one of today's most fascinating writers. This is denis johnson's biggest and most complex book to date, and it perfectly showcases his signature themes of fate, redemption and the unraveling of the fabric of today's society.

. Now lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. A contemporary noir, Already Dead is the tangled story of Nelson Fairchild Jr. Disenfranchised scion to a northern California land fortune. Desperate, for nelson, terrified and alone, there may be only one way out. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable marijuana patch hidden in the lush old-growth redwoods on the family land.

Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Nelson has some serious problems. What's more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90, 000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he's attempted to pull off.

His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories

Nobody ever came close. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Johnson is a writer whose ambitions were in their own way as broad and burgeoning as Dostoyevsky’s.

We’re just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world’s greatest writers. Npr“johnson offers visions and sadness and laughter. 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.

Praise for the largesse of the Sea Maiden “An instant classic. Newsday “Exceptional luminosity. But it’s the sentences—those adamantine, poetic sentences—that made him one of America’s great and lasting writers.

Jesus' Son: Stories

Jesus' son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. Picador USA. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. These stories tell of spiraling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again.

.

Train Dreams: A Novella

Picador USA. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Picador USA. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. A new york times notable bookan esquire best book of 2011a new yorker favorite Book of 2011A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2011 Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions.

It is the story of robert grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century-an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this novella by the National Book Award--winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

.

Fiskadoro

Deeply moving and provacative, fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

Hailed by the new york times as "wildly ambitious" and "the sort of book that a young herman melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, and Dog Soldiers, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, ' Fahrenheit 451, 'The Wasteland, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, " Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow.

Picador USA. Picador USA.

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man: A Novel

In pursuit of the artist―and love, and redemption―Lenny will resort to great and desperate measures to revive himself, and his faith in the world. As lenny falls in love with a beautiful young local, he soon begins his first assignment, a woman whose sexual orientation should preclude the affair, a search for a missing painter whose personal history seems to mirror his own.

Picador USA. Recovering from a recent suicide attempt, he takes a job as a third-shift disk jockey, his soul suspended in its own off-season, with a little private detective work on the side for his boss. He writes with a natural authority, and there is real music in his prose. Mona simpson, the new york times book ReviewIn the bleak of November, Lenny English drifts into the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown.

Denis Johnson is an artist. Picador USA. Picador USA.

Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

And, as readers of his previous work know, Johnson's path to consecration frequently requires a limning of the darkest abyss. Picador USA. And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. If the path to knowledge lies in experience, Seek is a fascinating record of Johnson's profoundly moving pilgrimage.

Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. Picador USA. A world of such wild, grasping it, rocketing energy that, anything at all is possible. Whether traveling through war-ravaged liberia, mingling with the crowds at a Christian Biker rally, exploring his own authority issues through the lens of this nation's militia groups, or attempting to unearth his inner resources while mining for gold in the wilds of Alaska, Johnson writes with a mixture of humility and humorous candor that is everywhere present.

With the breathtaking and often haunting lyricism for which his work is renowned, Johnson considers in these pieces our need for transcendence. Part political disquisition, part self-exploration, part travel journal, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world.

Picador USA.

The Name of the World: A Novel

Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. The acclaimed author of jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, he observes, or the recent war.

Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, " he manages, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, against all his expectations, polite terror, and small, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth.

Elegant and incisively observed, the Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Picador USA. Picador USA. Picador USA. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking.

Nothing can touch reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him.

Tree of Smoke

. Picador USA. Picador USA. Tree of smoke is the story of william "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. Tree of smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. One of the new york times 10 best books of the yearnamed a best book of the year by time, Chicago Tribune, The National Book Critics Circle, Slate, The Washington Post, Salon, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor.

. In the words of michiko kakutani in the new York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war. Picador USA. Picador USA. It is also the story of the houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away.

.