Train Dreams
A Novella
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Now a major motion picture starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones–coming to Netflix on November 21!
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011
From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction.
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.
It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Train Dreams packs a lot of ideas about a lost America into a slim novella bursting with quirky characters and unforgettable imagery. At the centre is Robert Grainier, a manual labourer in the pre-WWII American Northwest. We follow him from state to state and job to job (railroad work, logging, and other manual labour) and share in his curious, alternately funny and moving encounters along the way. We watch him shift from solitary soul to family man and risk it all in his hardscrabble, itinerant work. Denis Johnson’s unpretentiously poetic prose provides rich period details and digs into both mythology and history as the story moves organically between the everyday and the otherworldly. There’s a quiet kind of magic to it all as we experience the push and pull between the industrial and natural worlds; it’s easy to see why it was adapted to film. Train Dreams is a lot of things, but most of all, it’s uniquely American.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers eager for a fat follow-up to Tree of Smoke could be forgiven a modicum of skepticism at this tidy volume a reissue of a 2003 O. Henry Prize winning novella that originally appeared in the Paris Review but it would be a shame to pass up a chance to encounter the synthesis of Johnson's epic sensibilities rendered in miniature in the clipped tone of Jesus' Son. The story is a snapshot of early 20th-century America as railroad laborer Robert Granier toils along the rails that will connect the states and transform his itinerant way of life. Drinking in tent towns and spending summers in the wilds of Idaho, Granier misses the fire back home that leaves no trace of his wife and child. The years bring diminishing opportunities, strange encounters, and stranger dreams, but it's not until after participating in the miracle of flight and a life-changing encounter with a mythical monster that Granier realizes what he's been looking for. An ode to the vanished West that captures the splendor of the Rockies as much as the small human mysteries that pass through them, this svelte stand-alone has the virtue of being a gem in itself, and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to Johnson.
