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"The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, France’s National Research Agency, the " +
            "Simons Foundation for the Social Brain, the Human Frontiers Science Program, John Doerr, the Open Philanthropy Project, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.\n","Let us review what is so good about Denis Johnson. I have often performed this exercise, with a modicum of writerly envy, over the decades of reading his work: What exactly is the alchemical magic in these pages? Everyone who started writing seriously in the 1980s or 1990s can tell you where he or she first consumed the morsels that eventually made up “Jesus’ Son,” Johnson’s breakthrough 1992 story collection. To behold those lines for the first time was to see language unaccountably capturing emotions in a way unfamiliar in recent American prose. Johnson once noted that he was working under the star of Isaac Babel while writing “Jesus’ Son,” and it showed; just as Babel saw (for example) the Russian sunset as others had not previously, Johnson transformed his misfits and heroin addicts until they became like protagonists from the time of epics.\n" +
            "“Angels,” Johnson’s 1983 debut novel, was similarly revelatory — making the homely backdrop of a Greyhound bus journey suddenly appropriate to the highest American literature. If Johnson sometimes stumbled in later books (he was prolific), they were exceptions in a long, restless and varied career that included not only fiction but plays, nonfiction and some impressive poetry collections. (I recommend “The Incognito Lounge.”)\n" +

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"What made the effective books so effective? In part, it is the consciousness of mortality found " +
            "everywhere in his best work. This is the guy, after all, who wrote “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” and “Already Dead.” It is the rare Denis Johnson work that doesn’t explicitly take up end-of-life questions. From the death-row sequences of “Angels” to the murder and car crashes and heroin addiction of “Jesus’ Son” to the Vietnam War setting of “Tree of Smoke,” his 2007 National Book Award-winning novel, there is ever a wafting of mortal fumes across Johnson’s paragraphs.\n","Didn’t think of it as teaching so much as conversations with other writers, often moved from classrooms into cafes, bars. Did teach a course from time to time called “Exemplary Ancient Fictions,” in which we worked our way from creation myths and the Gilgamesh epic through Ovid and medieval romance, writing our own fictions, touching on the various stages of the reading along the way (dream stories, animal tales, transformations, etc.). We also read imaginative contemporary writing (Calvino, Carter, Borges, Elkin, Merwin, etc.), so we didn’t always reach, before semester ended, my favorite text, “La Celestina” (aka the “Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea”), probably by a converso Jew named Fernando de Rojas, a beautifully complex 15th-century work that gave rise to both the Golden Age in Spanish drama and the birth of the novel. Best book in the language after Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.”\n" +
            "“On Being Blue” and “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife,” by William Gass, are disguised as novellas, but " +