A few months ago, we gave our strongest possible recommendation that you drop everything read a book called Jesus’ Son, written by the late great Denis Johnson. If you still haven’t completed this task, please click here.

Something that would be blatantly obvious to anyone who actually went on to read it is that - in terms of our overall tone - we’re pretty damn guilty of trying to emulate Johnson’s style over here at IB HQ; spare but poetic, darkly evocative, suffuse with the kind of morbid humor you’d expect from a beat gen giant like Burroughs or Brautigan.

While Jesus’ Son is often cited as Johnson’s magnum opus, it’s really just scratching the surface of what is one of the richest and most unique bodies of work in all of modern fiction. Let’s dive deeper, shall we?

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Train Dreams

A historical epic in miniature. Follows a day laborer named Robert Grainier, framing his fortunes and follies against the old west’s gradual transition into the industrial age. This is a genuinely heartbreaking novella that can be read in two hours; reads like a ghost story being told by the a soot-faced, gold-rush era prospector.

Tree of Smoke

A dark and morbidly comic trip down the Vietnam War’s CIA rabbit hole. While this is certainly the longest and most convoluted book Johnson ever wrote, it still retains the accessibility of his earlier work; it’s been called his War and Peace.

Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Five haunting meditations on mortality and transcendence a la Raymond Carver, who it just so happens was one of Johnson’s instructors at UT Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Good luck holding back the floodgates during the ending to “Triumph over the Grave,” the book’s tear-jerking, penultimate story - and quite possibly my favorite piece of short literature ever written.

Angels

Another tearjerker. Centered on two restless, nomadic souls as they drift across the midwest on a Greyhound bus, neither with any specific destination in mind; their journey is solely a spiritual one, a non-stop exodus from a series of increasingly ill-fated situations punctuated by rare, fleeting moments of beauty.

The Name of the World

Another late-era novella, centered on a history professor’s feeble attempts to repair his soul following an unspeakable tragedy that leaves him completely indifferent towards the outcome of the remainder of his life. For fans of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Camus - writers who had a direct in-line to the region of the brain associated with pain and suffering. —Jackson Todd

[above photo: still from the movie adaptation of Jesus’ Son]