Date: Tuesday, 21 March 2017
Time: 19:30 (7:30 pm)
Register by: 20 March 2017 (registration form below)
The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson’s novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays — a runaway wife toting along two kids — and Bill Houston — ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con — on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise.
Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America’s dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.
A couple reviews:
“Johnson succeeds so well as to make one eager for more” (John Sutherland London Review of Books)
“A beautifully tragic chronicle” (New York Magazine)
“Denis Johnson is one of our most inventive, unpredictable novelists” (New York Times Book Review)
“Johnson knows his people inside out, their lost, lonely, never-had-a-chance lives. He knows how they talk and think, and he makes us know them too” (Publishers Weekly)
“One of the strongest examples of fiction noir since Robert Stone’s first work appeared-with an absence of sentimentality and an overall shape that’s perfectly judged, this is one of the most impressive first novels of recent seasons – full of a fiery recoiling kick, the dreadful power of inhuman ugliness and misfortune beyond redemption” (Kirkus Reviews)
Cost for Guests: 5 euro p.p.
