The Side of Denis Johnson You Never Knew

Reality is unreal, and the unreal is reality. The late Denis Johnson, who died five years ago, seems to have viewed the world this way, and embodies that paradox in nearly all of his work—his poetry, his fiction, his nonfiction, and his plays. Again and again, in genre after genre, he portrays the astonishment, both sacramental and horrendous, of being alive and conscious in an inexplicable universe.