Read Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson Online

Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being his "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Significant Seven, September 2007: Denis Johnson is one of those few great hopes of American writing, fully capable of pulling out a ground-changing masterpiece, as he did in 1992 with the now-legendary collection, Jesus' Son. --Tom Nissley. This is the book Johnson fans have been wait

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.". 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, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor.Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. 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

Perplexing reviews at Amazon Normally the average Amazon customer rating on a book matters to me lots and I am quicker to read the customer reviews than editorial reviews. But the relatively negative reaction to Tree of Smoke has left me perplexed. I've seen far far less powerful less well-written books get far better ratings.I found Tree of Smoke extraordinary. To me it was a book that included unique, compelling characters; an exciting plot line (albeit certainly far from easy to unders. "The bad reviews are simply wrong." according to Laughinggrrl. Perplexing is putting it kindly. I am astonished at the idiotic reviews this extraordinary book has received. It won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer, for goodness sake. All I can deduce from the spate of bad reviews is that most of the reviewers are obviously not intelligent enough to read it. So sad.It is a very very difficult book to read because it's about war, of course. It's heavy and emotionally jarring, true. I'm going to rea. "Quiet American: an encore" according to H. Schneider. Between Kleist and Conrad, I need to look at contemporaries once in a while, just for fairness to the new writers and for keeping updated.I have frequently picked up award winners like this one (National Book Award for fiction in 2007) and have found them a mixed crop, as could be reasonably expected. I met some good writers this way, and I have been disappointed a lot as well. (Maybe most of all by the fairly recent German Nationaler Buchpreis.)Where is Denis

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