JOHNSON, Denis. Tree of Smoke. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Intricate gilt stamped design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 614 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Denis Johnson (1949–2017) spent his career as one of the most singular and unclassifiable writers in American literature — a poet, playwright, and novelist whose work operated at extreme psychological and moral pressure, in a prose style that combined visionary intensity with a journalist's eye for the concrete detail. His short story collection Jesus' Son (1992) is among the most celebrated works of American short fiction of the last half century. Tree of Smoke, published in 2007 after nine years of work, is his most ambitious novel and won the National Book Award for Fiction in the year of its publication. Time magazine named it one of the ten best books of 2007.

The novel is set in Vietnam and Southeast Asia between 1963 and 1983, and it is one of the very few works of American fiction to have engaged with the Vietnam War at a scale commensurate with the subject. At its centre is Skip Skofield, a young CIA operative who arrives in Vietnam full of idealism and a belief in the possibility of a just counterintelligence operation, and who gradually discovers that the war is being prosecuted in ways that make idealism not merely difficult but meaningless. Skip works under the direction of his uncle, Colonel Francis Skofield — a man of formidable intelligence and absolute conviction whose plan to run a Vietnamese double agent named Trung becomes the novel's central mystery and the instrument of multiple destructions. Alongside Skip's story runs that of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men from the Arizona desert who drift into the war without ideology or ambition, and whose fates trace the human cost of a conflict in which they have no genuine stake.

Johnson wrote the novel as a deliberate response to what he felt was the inadequacy of the existing literature about Vietnam — the absence of a work that dealt with the war at the scale and moral complexity it deserved. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, Tree of Smoke is a story like nothing else in American literature. Johnson died in May 2017. Signed copies of his work carry the significance of a posthumous signature from one of the most important American writers of his generation.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000534