A review by blaineduncan
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson

4.0

It’s a bit of a fault of mine that I shy away from short story collections, even those by authors I adore. There just is something about not having chapters to create natural pauses and not living with the characters over the course of the two hundred pages. I need something that keeps me coming back. With short story collections, I tend to put the book down for too long after finishing one of the tales. My preference would then lean towards reading short stories individually, outside of a collection. But when I heard that Denis Johnson was getting a posthumous release of short stories less than a year after his death from cancer, I was excited: Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a renowned volume of stories, were so connected that they could almost be considered a novel. His novella Train Dreams is one of the best works in recent American prose.

The rest of the review here:

https://thealabamatake.wordpress.com/2018/02/07/the-finality-of-the-largesse-of-the-sea-maiden/