The Laughing Monsters

In Sierra Leone, suspicion has become the law. A contemporary spy thriller from the great American writer Denis Johnson, author of Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke.

This high-suspense tale offer a more convincing portrait of amoral intelligence agents and the havoc they wreak than almost any journalistic account of Third World skullduggery

For all its chaos and complexity, The Laughing Monsters is one of Johnson’s most disciplined efforts

This echoes of Graham Greene’s bleak cynicism and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it’s a gripping romp through a world of corruption, government interference, big business manipulation and all sorts of other shenanigans to boot

It has an irresistible sense of hopelessness

The Laughing Monsters is part espionage thriller and part screwball comedy, and it straddles those far-flung genres with more grace than you might think possible

Short, sharp-edged and often very funny novel

The moral ambiguity, corruption and exploitation that the author gradually reveals on the ground in modern Africa is breathtaking, without ever being preachy or didactic

Refreshingly, The Laughing Monsters mostly rejects the passé heroics and moral clarity of traditional James Bond-style thrillers for something more complicated. It is never a case of mission accomplished…but that only adds to the intrigue

The Laughing Monsters…walks in the steps of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.

Heart of Darkness mixed with espionage – madness seeps into the fibre of the story.

Johnson's tenth novel is a stunner: the story of Roland Nair, a rogue intelligence agent looking to make a big score in Sierra Leone amid the detritus and chaos of the post-war-on-terrorism world. Johnson's sentences are always brilliant, but it is in the interstices, the gray areas of the story, that he really excels."

National Book Award winner Denis Johnson has brilliantly plumbed the mystical and the macabre in such works as Tree of Smoke and his instant classic Jesus’ Son. The Laughing Monsters delivers a more commercial, post-9/11 tale of intrigue, deception, romance, and misadventure set in West Africa without losing Johnson’s essentially poetic drive . . . With each twist, Johnson deftly ups the stakes while adding to the cavalcade of entrepreneurs, assassins, seers, and smugglers that populate the book, tuning us in to the roiling political realities and cultural complexities of Africa today . . . This visionary novel is always falling together, never apart. That’s Johnson.

And for his next trick, Johnson delivers a taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he's shadowing in Africa . . . As in any good double-agent story, Johnson obscures whose side Roland is really on, and Roland himself hardly knows the answer either: Befogged by frustrations and bureaucracy, his lust for Davidia and simple greed, he slips deeper into violence and disconnection. Johnson expertly maintains the heart-of-darkness mood . . . his antihero's story is an intriguing metaphor for [post-9/11 lawlessness]

Denis Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, five collections of poetry, two collections of plays and one book of reportage. Among other honours, his novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and Train Dreams was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

‘In this land of chaos and despair, all I can do is wish for magic armour and the power to disappear.’ 
 
Freetown, Sierra Leone. A city of heat and dirt, of guns and militia. Alone in its crowded streets, Captain Roland Nair has been given a single assignment. He must find Michael Adriko – maverick, warrior, and the man who has saved Nair's life three times and risked it many more. 
 
The two men have schemed, fought and profited together in the most hostile regions of the world. But on this new level – espionage, state secrets, treason – their loyalties will be tested to the limit. 
 
This is a brutal journey through a land abandoned by the future – a journey that will lead them to meet themselves not in a new light, but in a new darkness.

Angels

'Prose of amazing power and stylishness' Philip Roth

Johnson succeeds so well as to make one eager for more

Denis Johnson is one of our most inventive, unpredictable novelists

Johnson knows his people inside out, their lost, lonely, never-had-a-chance lives. He knows how they talk and think, and he makes us know them too

One of the strongest examples of fiction noir since Robert Stone's first work appeared-with an absence of sentimentality and an overall shape that's perfectly judged, this is one of the most impressive first novels of recent seasons - full of a fiery recoiling kick, the dreadful power of inhuman ugliness and misfortune beyond redemption

‘A dazzling and savage first novel’ New York Times 
 
Angels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up. 
 
 So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime, to madness and death. 
 
From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Fiskadoro

'A marvellous book, beautifully written and constantly entertaining-. He is a wonderful storyteller' Washington Post

Wildly ambitious. . . Its strange, hallucinatory vision of America and modern history is never less than compelling

A leap of the imagination. . . stunningly delivered

Haunting. . .an eerie and powerful visionary novel

'Daring and provocative... Startlingly original' New York Times 
 
The nuclear holocaust has been and gone, and now everything is different. In Twicetown, once Key West, two missiles sit unexploded, objects of awe and indifference. Mr Cheung teaches the boy Fiskadoro to play the clarinet; Grandmother Wright, the oldest person in the world, endlessly relives the fall of Saigon; Cassius Clay Sugar Ray trades in radioactive artefacts. Boats go out to comb the sea for fish, and the sea keeps some of the men. Tossing fitfully in nightmares of forgotten wars, lazing in the tropical heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a lost civilization pursue their lives through a world of fractured memories. And they wait - for the Cubans to come, for the Quarantine to be lifted, for the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus to return and build their kingdoms. 
 
From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Denis Johnson

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

He worked at a level different from the rest of us – a true master.

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.

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.

Irish Independent, *The best reads of 2018: Our critics name their top picks*

How to sum up? It's... mind-blowing. Seriously. A lifetime book

**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.

Denis Johnson

Praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

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 ...

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 d ...**

[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.

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 ...

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 d ...**

[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.

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 ...

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 d ...**

[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.

Books by Denis Johnson

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Praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

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 ...

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 d ...

[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.

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 ...

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 d ...

[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.

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 ...

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 d ...

[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.

Books by Denis Johnson

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

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 d ...**

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 d ...**

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 d ...**