Train Dreams

Denis Johnson may well be the best writer going. He can do big, in the Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke, and small, in the stories of Jesus' Son and in this haunting jewel, which appeared in The Paris Review in 2002 and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize when it was finally released as a book in 2011. In just 116 pages, he finds the grandeur and sorrow in the span of the single, nearly anonymous life of a railway and logging worker in the Northwest in the first half of the last century.