Denis Johnson wrote about some of the most unlikable
characters in American fiction, and yet he always managed to make readers care
what happened to them. This talent may have had something to do with many
unlikable qualities in Johnson himself that, through …

Drugs, car
crashes, felonious assaults, and murders most foulJohnson managed to bring
poetry to the worst places in which he had ever gotten himself lost, like an
urban-alleyway version of a high …