RaveThe Financial TimesJohnson’s imagination is habitually drawn to the kind of overwhelmingly vivid experiences, drugged, maddened or violent, that are so powerful they seem like visions, like revelations charged with meaning beyond ordinary experience ... This passionate and exceptional personality is now gone from the world, surviving only in such memories and in Johnson’s work, the final instalment of which, the short stories collected in The Largesse of The Sea Maiden... Some of the stories cover the same ground as Jesus’ Son, an addict’s rock bottom seen in chastened retrospect. Others are mellower, looser and take obvious pleasure in life’s strangeness. The prose remains as deliriously alive as ever.
