They aren't always arranged in chronological order and might not have happened the way Fuckhead thinks. In content, his stories are like those shared at Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where participants are encouraged to talk about past tribulations there is a freewheeling, mixed-up quality to them. The narrator, "Fuckhead", is an alcoholic and drug addict. Its brief, linked stories take place in 1970s Iowa, Chicago, Seattle, and Phoenix. Published in 1992, Jesus' Son is one of the best short story collections of the last 25 years, and its current unavailability in the UK is a joke. Along with Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories, bought the same summer, it was the one that most powerfully demonstrated to me the unique possibilities of the short story. If there was ever a book designed to prove irresistible to my 17-year-old self, the Faber first edition of Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson is it. A Sacred Heart Jesus, an iconographic representation of a drug capsule, a light-damaged photograph of tract housing in middle America, and an epigraph from "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground.
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