Winner of the National Book Award

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year


Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . .

Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."

Praise

"Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book."--The New York Times Book Review

"The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson's."--Jonathan Franzen

 

"I can't be sure that there's been a better American novel published in the past ten years. It is a masterpiece."--The Miami Herald

"It will . . . get inside your head like the war it is describing--mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. [Johnson] has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a snake."--The Washington Post Book World

"Tree of Smoke is a masterpiece of language and depth."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Johnson has captured the zeitgeist of American experience as surely as Twain, Hemingway, or Ellison."--New York Post

"Opens a window onto a world of mystery, war, and intrigue whose importance in the (usually) unwritten history of our republic can't be denied."--Chicago Tribune

 

"Johnson has written his War and Peace."--Harper's Magazine

 

About the Author(s)

Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson is the author of seven works of fiction, three collections of poetry, and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award, among many other honors for his work.

photo: Cindy Johnson

Excerpt

Chapter one
Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell themwhat had happened to the President.

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