I have to include this one. Why? You’ll have to read my seminal 2025 memoir, THE BLACK POOL (2025), to find out. Don’t want to? Well, that’s fine: apart from Barry Hannah – who is, I think, what would happen if Kenny Powers had written short fiction: and I mean this in a good way – nobody writes janky, apparently offhand, apparently casual improv sentences that begin, taper up, and interrupt themselves halfway along, the way – yes – the smoke of something bad for you does quite the way Denis Johnson does. I just tried to do that and I couldn’t. I feel like he didn’t really write so much as expose, in linguistic terms, through a frightening, zenlike readiness of mind, some chaotic suprahuman principle of words themselves, which always want to do more than we want them to, and which are trying to wipe us out, and which are relentlessly, tenaciously at once human and not the way the bones making up a skull are at once human and not. However, at least they can get us to make some funny jokes whilst we are being squooshed back into our own pre-birth red pulp, the way the lads in this do, God willing, one day at a time.
First published in The New Yorker, September 8, 1991 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Jesus’ Son, Picador, 1992, and widely anthologised, including in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014
A Personal Anthology 