Another collection of short stories that's been getting under my skin lately is
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson's (winner of this years's National Book Award for his novel
Tree of Smoke).
What are these interconnected stories "about"? Well, let's see: they're "about" voice - the voice of a first-person narrator who's sometimes sentimental, sometimes bitter, often funny, as he recounts his misadventures in and out of love, in and out of bars, with and without drugs.
I recently read one of these stories, "Work," in the anthology I mentioned in my last post, edited by Richard Ford, then wanted to hear more of that voice. Here's the first paragraph of that story:
Quote:
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I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.
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(Johnson's kinetic, driven, I-did-this-I-did-that prose sometimes reminds me a bit of Kerouac.)
Amazon.com: Jesus' Son: Stories by: Denis Johnson: Books