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Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson
Paperback
Biographies GeneralLiterary Figures
Publisher Price: $22.50
ISBN13: 9781685970376
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: Nov 11 2025
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.36
Height: 1.18 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.98
Language: English
The year was 1988, and Denis Johnson was at a low point. He caught malaria on a reporting trip into the jungles of the Philippines and was nearly pronounced dead. The disease left him unable to write. His second wife left him. He didn't have enough money to pay his taxes. His publisher was waiting for a book that he hadn't started. But in the life of Denis Johnson, when things were at their bleakest, something good was usually waiting around the next corner. This time, what emerged from the chaos was his masterpiece Jesus' Son, a book that would tap into the zeitgeist of the 1990s and become a bible for Generation X and an American classic.
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures tells the complete story of Johnson's fascinating life, his thrill-seeking trips into war zones as a magazine correspondent, his battles with addiction, his live-it-before-you-write-it style of fiction. It follows the arc of his tremendous body of work as a novelist, journalist, poet, and playwright, and in the process recovers the true stories from the hazy myths that one of our most beloved, yet enigmatic, writers left behind.
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