The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories is a 2018 short story collection by Denis Johnson. It was published posthumously on January 16, 2018, by Random House. It consists of five short stories, three of which were previously published in The New Yorker and Playboy. Johnson finished the collection a few weeks before his death in May 2017.[1]
Of the five stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, three already appeared in print:
"The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" was originally published in the March 3, 2014, issue of The New Yorker magazine.[4]
"The Starlight on Idaho" was originally published in different form[5] in the February 2007 issue of Playboy magazine.[6]
"Strangler Bob" was originally published posthumously in the October 23, 2017, issue of The New Yorker.[7]
The other two stories in the collection, "Triumph Over the Grave" and "Doppelganger, Poltergeist" appeared for the first time in the collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.
Johnson completed works in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden while he was dying of liver cancer in 2017. The collection was published posthumously by Random House on January 16, 2018.[8]
Audiobook
For the audiobook, each of the five stories was read by a different actor. "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" is read by Nick Offerman, "The Starlight on Idaho" by Michael Shannon, "Strangler Bob" by Dermot Mulroney, "Triumph Over the Grave" by Will Patton, and "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist" by Liev Schreiber.[9][10]
Reception
At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the collection received a cumulative "Rave" rating based on 38 reviews: 31 "Rave" reviews, 6 "Positive" reviews, and 1 "Mixed" review.[11]
Publishers Weekly gave the collection a rave review, deeming it "an instant classic" and calling it "a masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose."[12]
Maureen Corrigan of NPR praised the collection, singling out "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" and "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist" as "out-of-this-world" and concluding that the collection "contains the kind of work every writer would like to go out on: fresh, profound and singular. It affirms literature's promise to believers, the gift of eternal voice."[13]
Critical assessment
The posthumous publication of Johnson's second collection of short stories elicited both critical praise and regret at the author's passing. Gavin Corbett of The Irish Times welcomed The Largesse of the Sea Maiden as "a major event in American letters."[14]
Sandy English of the World Socialist Web Site regarded the collection as "perhaps Johnson's best work" in which the themes "responded, in his own way, to the changes in American life in the last quarter century."[15]
Critic Troy Jollimore remarks on the significance of the volume's title:
The word largesse isn't much used anymore. Perhaps it refers to a kind of profound and liberal bounteousness that isn't often to be observed in American life today. But it's a perfect word to describe Johnson's fiction, which overflows with creative energy, moving from one beauty to another with a mercurial, at times almost chaotic grace. Although his characters are often diminished and winnowed by their struggles with life, the narrative voice that describes their travails gives evidence of an imagination that is nearly boundless in its generosity and abundance.[17]
Theme
Themes that invoke "God" and religion appear as key elements in Johnson's final volume of short stories. Social critic Sandy English writes: "It is not a surprise that mystical and semi-religious elements, always present in Johnson's work, are more pronounced in Largesse of the Sea Maiden."[18] Johnson's narratives in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden emphasize the ineluctable advent of death.
"I don't think in terms of themes—or think in any terms, really. I'm making what T.S. Eliot called 'quasi-musical decisions.' I'm just improvising and adapting, and in that case I suspect the story's course reflects the process of trying to make it...I get in a teacup and start paddling across the little pond and say, 'In seven weeks, I'll land on Mars.' Five years later I'm still going in circles. When I reach the shore within spitting distance of where I started, it's a colossal triumph."—Denis Johnson in a 2014 email to literary critic David L. Ulin[19]
Author Kevin Zambrano writes: "This grimy religiosity is more in keeping with Jesus' Son, but like every story in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, it is also fixated on death. The narrator believes he can defy it, which scans as more crazy chatter, but isn't belief in eternal life the crux of Christianity?"[20] Author David L. Ulin comments on themes that address "mortality" in Johnson's final literary work:
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden represents...the general condition of mortality the writer and the reader share... Where it leaves us, then, is not with testament so much as with a sliver of the author's living soul. I'm referring to pragmatics, not theology...Johnson balances wonder and degradation; transcendence and despair.[21]
Critic Aaron Thier defines the literary function of "God" in Johnson's The Largesse of the Sea Maiden:
Whatever "God" meant to Johnson in his private life, "God" in his fiction is a way of referring to those aspects of human experience that seem excessive or out of scale...At the same time this "God" is an aspect of reality: an extraordinary vision is the product of ordinary experience. Eternity, in Johnson's work, is something you can hold in your hand and throw against the wall. It is also a thing that can throw you against the wall...[22]
Comparison-Contrast: Jesus' Son and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Johnson's short story oeuvre is represented in two collections: Jesus' Son (1992), comprising 11 works of short fiction, and his Largess of the Sea Maiden (2018), published posthumously 25 years after his first collection, and containing 5 stories. The volumes have elicited commentary by a number of critics on their respective styles and themes.[23] Author David L. Ulin argues that the collections defy comparison.[24]
The stories in both collections are written exclusively from the first-person point-of-view. While the pieces in Jesus' Son are told by the same youthful narrator, a drug addict identified as "Fuckhead", The Largesse of the Sea Maiden presents a number of unique narrators. Several settings and characters appear in both collections. Critic Kevin Zambrano notes that "like "Beverly Home," "The Starlight on Idaho" takes its name from a rehab clinic, and Dundun, a character from Jesus' Son, reappears in "Strangler Bob" as part of a triad of jailhouse companions" in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.[25][26][27]
Three of the stories in the 2018 collection diverge from Jesus' Son in that Johnson presents "aging bourgeois professionals, dislocated less from society...Gone are flying women, flowers from Andromeda, crazy explanations for everything. What's left is a vast sense of bewilderment."[28][29] Social critic Sandy English offers a similar assessment:
In The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the world, on the surface, is more stable than in either Jesus' Son or the novel Tree of Smoke (2007). Rather than a self-indulgent free-for-all, or a devastating war, there are in these stories the confines of jobs, rehab centers, even—perhaps symbolically—prison.[30]
"People die in Jesus' Son, most of them on accident; in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, they're murdered, they hang themselves, their corpses are exhumed by mad poets. If Jesus' Son dazzles with the mind-expanding perceptions it draws from the world, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden seem to see, as Wallace Stevens put it, "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Perhaps this point-of-view comes from proximity to death. Certainly with that comes self-consciousness, and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden has a reflexive dimension that Jesus' Son lacks."—Kevin Zambrano in The Rumpus (2018)[31]
Stylistically, Johnson maintains the same excellence in crafting his sentences. Critic Anthony Domestico writes: "The main thing linking The Largesse of the Sea Maiden to Jesus's Son are his sentences...it's the sentences—those adamantine, poetic sentences—that made him one of America's great and lasting writers. It's the sentences that live on."[32] Geoff Dyer admires "the slipshod magnificence and crazy wonder of the Johnsonian sentence. Clause by clause, word by word, anything becomes plausible."[33]
Kevin Zambrano qualifies his praise for Johnson's sentence structure: "More dissimilar than the collections' subject matter are their styles. Despite the greater length of the new stories [in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden], Johnson's sentences have grown more economical, even prosaic." Zambrano suggests that Johnson has traded "brilliance" for "profundity" in these final stories.[34]
↑ Corbett 2018: "The posthumous publication of [The Largesse of the Sea Maiden]...a slim short-story collection, [and] Denis Johnson's second after the great Jesus' Son (1992), is a major event in American letters."
↑ English 2019: "These five stories are perhaps his best work and show that the author responded, in his own way, to changes in American life over the last quarter century."
↑ Giraldi 2018: "In his assertion of a distinctive American mythos, Johnson's only rivals in the short story are Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver."
↑ Zambrano 2018: "A second collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden...makes a fitting bookend to a celebrated career, as well as a surprising counterpoint to Jesus' Son."
↑ Ulin 2018: "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is a very different book than Jesus' Son; even to compare the two seems beside the point."
↑ Jollimore 2018: "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is in certain respects a successor to Jesus' Son. Its characters, too, tend to be nonconformists driven to desperation, though the desperation here can be less overt and can assume various forms."
↑ Zambrano 2018: "You can't expect that much leeway in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the plainer prosody of which masks a bleaker view of the world."
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1965.
You never heard such silence
Denis Hale Johnson was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.
Jesus' Son is a 1999 drama film that was adapted from the eponymous short story collection by Denis Johnson. The film stars Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Holly Hunter, and Dennis Hopper, with Denis Leary, Will Patton, John Ventimiglia, Michael Shannon, and Jack Black in supporting roles. The film was directed by Alison Maclean and written by Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Oren Moverman.
Red Cavalry or Konarmiya is a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel about the 1st Cavalry Army. The stories take place during the Polish–Soviet War and are based on Babel's diary, which he maintained when he was a journalist assigned to the Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army. First published in the 1920s, the book was one of the Russian people's first literary exposures to the dark, bitter reality of the war. During the 1920s, writers of fiction were given a relatively good degree of freedom compared to the mass censorship and totalitarianism that would follow Joseph Stalin's ascent to power, and certain levels of criticism could even be published. But his works would be withdrawn from sale after 1933 and would not return to bookshelves until after Stalin's death twenty years later.
H. G. Wells was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His writing career spanned more than sixty years, and his early science fiction novels earned him the title of "The Father of Science Fiction".
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called the "Great American Novel," and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He also wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and non-fiction. His big break was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867).
Jesus' Son is a collection of short fiction by Denis Johnson published in 1992 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A short story cycle comprising 11 pieces, Jesus' Son is Johnson's most critically acclaimed and popular literary effort, and the work with which Johnson is most identified. In 1999, it was adapted into a film of the same name by Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia, and Oren Moverman, directed by Alison Maclean.
Troy Jollimore is a Canadian-American poet, philosopher, literary critic, and academic known for poetic writings.
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.
All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories is a collection of short stories by American author E.L. Doctorow. This book was first published in 2011 by Random House.
Train Dreams is a novella by Denis Johnson. It was published on August 30, 2011, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was originally published, in slightly different form, in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review.
Jesus' Son may refer to:
Grand Union: Stories is a 2019 short story collection by Zadie Smith. It was published on 3 October 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books.
Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is a novel by Denis Johnson published in 1991 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
"The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" is a short story by Denis Johnson. The work appears as the lead story in Johnson's short story collection of the same name, published posthumously by Random House in 2018.
"Car Crash While Hitchhiking" is a work of short fiction by the American writer Denis Johnson based on a real incident in Johnson's life. The story was first published in The Paris Review in 1989 and collected in the 1990 edition of The Best American Short Stories. "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" is the opening story in Johnson's short story collection Jesus' Son (1992).
"Triumph Over the Grave" is a short story by Denis Johnson first appearing in his collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden published in 2018 by Random House.
Nobody Move is a crime novel by Denis Johnson published in 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel first appeared as a four-part serial for Playboy magazine in 2008.
The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems is a collection of lyric poetry by Denis Johnson. Published in 1982 by Random House, the volume was Johnson's fourth book of poems.
Leah Hampton is a writer. She writes primarily about Appalachia, class, and climate change. Her debut collection, F*ckface, was named a Best Book of 2020 by Slate, Electric Literature, and PopMatters. She is currently the Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing Fellow in Residence at the University of Idaho’s Confluence Lab.
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