Reading List

Authors Like Denis Johnson

Q: Who writes like Denis Johnson?

The closest are Isaac Babel, whose Red Cavalry (1926) Johnson reportedly called the model for Jesus’ Son, Raymond Carver, who taught him at Iowa, and Lucia Berlin, whose stories come from the same world of drink and odd jobs.

Q: What should I read after Jesus’ Son?

Try Babel’s Red Cavalry or Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015).

Q: Which Denis Johnson book should I read first?

Train Dreams (2011) is the shortest way in at 116 pages; Jesus’ Son (1992) is the book most readers know him by; Tree of Smoke (2007) is the big novel.

Denis Johnson was born in Munich in 1949 and spent parts of his childhood in the Philippines and Japan. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop he took classes from Raymond Carver, and for most of his twenties he was addicted to drugs and alcohol and wrote little. He stopped drinking in 1978 and gave up recreational drugs in 1983. Then came Jesus’ Son (1992), stories narrated by an addict drifting through the Midwest, which, according to the New Yorker’s fiction editor, he once called a rip-off of Isaac Babel; Tree of Smoke (2007), a 624-page Vietnam novel that won the National Book Award; and Train Dreams, a 116-page novella about an Idaho railroad labourer whose wife and daughter are lost in a forest fire in 1920. He died at The Sea Ranch, California, in 2017. The ten writers below share his ground: damaged people, violence written beautifully, and grace arriving where nobody expects it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Short stories · Addiction · Grace · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Denis Johnson, start with Isaac Babel, whose Red Cavalry (1926) Johnson reportedly called the source of Jesus’ Son. Raymond Carver taught him at Iowa, and Lucia Berlin’s stories also come out of drink, odd jobs and the American West. Further down are the novelists of his Vietnam book and a writer who questions the romance of the drunk genius.

10 authors like Denis Johnson

The book behind Jesus’ Son

Isaac Babel

Russian, born in Odessa · Red Cavalry (1926), Odessa Stories (1931)

Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. In 1920 he was attached to Semyon Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army in the Polish–Soviet War, the material of the short, violent, lyrical stories of Red Cavalry. He was arrested by the NKVD in May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage and shot in Moscow in January 1940.

In 2013 the New Yorker’s fiction editor said Johnson had called Jesus’ Son a rip-off of Red Cavalry. The likeness is real: linked stories told by an unreliable witness, brutal events in radiant language, and wounded men described with a poet’s eye.

— Lisanne

Drink, written from inside

Malcolm Lowry

English · Ultramarine (1933), Under the Volcano (1947)

Lowry was born in New Brighton, on the Wirral, in 1909 and began drinking at fourteen. He arrived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the Day of the Dead in 1936, the starting point of Under the Volcano, and wrote much of his work while living in Canada. Alcoholism kept him from finishing the larger cycle he planned, and he died in Sussex in 1957.

The great novel of addiction before Johnson, and like Johnson’s best work it renders a ruined mind in sentences of great beauty. Lowry is denser and more allusive; read him for the same mixture of despair and longing for grace.

— Lisanne

Americans abroad, and the sinner’s faith

Graham Greene

British · The Power and the Glory (1940), The Quiet American (1955)

Greene was born in Berkhamsted in 1904 and died in Switzerland in 1991. The Quiet American, set in Saigon during the French war in Indochina, follows a British journalist and Pyle, an idealistic American working for the CIA whose meddling ends in a bombing that kills civilians. The Power and the Glory follows a hunted, drinking priest in Mexico.

Tree of Smoke is about CIA men in Vietnam a decade after Pyle, and Greene is its natural ancestor. Both novelists write Catholic stories about sinners who cannot escape God, though Greene’s plots are tighter and his prose cooler.

— Lisanne

Every book by Graham Greene →

Grace by violence

Flannery O’Connor

American · Wise Blood (1952), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)

O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and died of lupus in Milledgeville in 1964, aged 39. A Catholic writer, she described her stories as being about grace acting on characters who are not willing to support it; The Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972. In 2020 Loyola University Maryland renamed a residence hall named after her, citing racism in her private letters.

The American writer closest to Johnson’s theology: grace arriving through violence, in people the reader would cross the street to avoid. O’Connor is funnier and more controlled; Johnson is more tender towards his lost souls.

— Lisanne

Every book by Flannery O’Connor →

His teacher at Iowa

Raymond Carver

American · What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983)

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938 and stopped drinking on 2 June 1977 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. His stories are about working-class marriages, drink and money. His editor Gordon Lish cut many of them heavily; Carver objected, and the fuller versions were later published as Beginners (2009). He died in 1988.

Johnson took classes from Carver at Iowa, and both wrote their best work after getting sober, about people who had not. Carver’s stories are plain and withheld where Johnson’s break into visions, which makes them a good pair.

— Lisanne

Vietnam comes home

Robert Stone

American · Dog Soldiers (1974), A Flag for Sunrise (1981)

Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937, spent time with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and went to Vietnam in 1971 as a correspondent for a British journal. Dog Soldiers, about heroin brought back from the war to California, shared the National Book Award in 1975. A Flag for Sunrise is set around a revolution in a fictional Central American country. He died in 2015.

The novelist who got to Johnson’s territory first: Vietnam, drugs, Americans in other people’s wars and the hunger for God in all of it. Read Dog Soldiers before or after Tree of Smoke.

— Lisanne

The truth of a war story

Tim O’Brien

American · Going After Cacciato (1978), The Things They Carried (1990)

O’Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1946 and served in Vietnam, where he was wounded. Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979. In The Things They Carried he distinguishes “story-truth” from “happening-truth” and argues that the first is sometimes truer.

The other great American fiction of Vietnam, and like Johnson’s it lets dreams, rumours and visions sit beside fact. O’Brien writes as a soldier and Johnson as an outsider to the fighting, which makes them complementary.

— Lisanne

Stories from the same rough life

Lucia Berlin

American · A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), Welcome Home (2018)

Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936 and died in 2004, known mainly to readers of small presses. Her stories draw on her work as a cleaning woman, receptionist and teacher, including at the San Francisco County Jail, and on her alcoholism. A Manual for Cleaning Women, published eleven years after her death, became a bestseller.

Berlin and Johnson wrote out of the same America of bars, laundromats, detox wards and the West, and both find comedy and tenderness in it. She suits readers who loved the voice of Jesus’ Son and want it from a woman’s side.

— Lisanne

Idaho, loss and grace

Marilynne Robinson

American · Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004)

Robinson was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943 and taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Housekeeping, set in the lakeside town of Fingerbone, Idaho, follows two orphaned sisters and the drifting aunt who comes to care for them; it won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005.

The same northern Idaho landscape as Train Dreams, and the same feeling that loss and grace are made of one substance. Robinson is a Calvinist and a stylist of long, calm sentences; read her for the quiet side of Johnson.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marilynne Robinson →

Against the romance of the drunk

Leslie Jamison

American · The Empathy Exams (2014), The Recovering (2018)

Jamison was born in 1983. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath combines a memoir of her own alcoholism and sobriety with portraits of writers including John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys and Charles Jackson, and examines the whiskey-and-ink mythology that links drinking to genius.

The book that argues with how writers like Johnson are often read. Jamison takes the recovery seriously rather than the wreckage, which is the move Johnson’s own late work makes; read her if Jesus’ Son left you uneasy about how glamorous it can seem.

— Lisanne

Every book by Leslie Jamison →

Where to start if you loved Denis Johnson

If you want the source of Jesus’ Son, read Isaac Babel.

Red Cavalry (1926) is short, violent and strange in the same way.

If you want more stories like his, read Lucia Berlin.

A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015) is the closest collection in voice and setting.

If you want the Vietnam of Tree of Smoke, read Robert Stone.

Dog Soldiers (1974) brings the war home as heroin; then read Greene’s The Quiet American.

If you want the quiet side of Train Dreams, read Marilynne Robinson.

Housekeeping (1980) is set in the same northern Idaho of lakes and trains.

If you want Johnson himself, start with Train Dreams or Jesus’ Son.

Train Dreams (2011) is 116 pages; Jesus’ Son (1992) is the book most readers know him by.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Denis Johnson

Who writes like Denis Johnson?

The closest are Isaac Babel, whose Red Cavalry (1926) Johnson reportedly called the model for Jesus’ Son, Raymond Carver, who taught him at Iowa, and Lucia Berlin, whose stories come from the same world of drink and odd jobs.

What should I read after Jesus’ Son?

Try Babel’s Red Cavalry or Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015).

Is there a film of Train Dreams?

Yes. Clint Bentley’s film, starring Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, premiered at Sundance in 2025 and on Netflix on 21 November 2025, and received four nominations at the 98th Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Does Denis Johnson have a new book?

No. Johnson died in 2017, and his last book, the stories of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, appeared in 2018. Ted Geltner’s biography Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures was published at the end of 2025.

Which Denis Johnson book should I read first?

Train Dreams (2011) is the shortest way in at 116 pages; Jesus’ Son (1992) is the book most readers know him by; Tree of Smoke (2007) is the big novel.

Was Denis Johnson a student of Raymond Carver?

Yes. He took classes from Carver at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned his MFA in 1974 and later taught.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Denis Johnson

10 authors like Denis Johnson

Isaac Babel

Malcolm Lowry

Graham Greene

Flannery O’Connor

Raymond Carver

Robert Stone

Tim O’Brien

Lucia Berlin

Marilynne Robinson

Leslie Jamison

Where to start if you loved Denis Johnson

Frequently asked questions about authors like Denis Johnson

Who writes like Denis Johnson?

What should I read after Jesus’ Son?

Is there a film of Train Dreams?

Does Denis Johnson have a new book?

Which Denis Johnson book should I read first?

Was Denis Johnson a student of Raymond Carver?

Lisanne Swart

Thanks for reading,

Offerings

My Bookshelf |

The Hotpot |

Questions from readers |

Links

Instagram |

Pinterest |

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!