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Title: Beautiful and Tragic
Review: This slim book can easily be read in a few hours. The short stories are all vignettes out of the lives of the addicted and the desperate.What this book does, better than any other book I've read, is capture the beauty and tragedy of these lost lives. Johnson is great at imagery, whether the misty, sunlit dive bar on a rickety pier, or the deserted drive-in in the snow. He's also great at writing from the inside of these characters-- their tragic worldview makes sense through their eyes. The hallucinatory beauty of these "prose-poems" goes hand-in-hand with the altered perceptions of the characters-- these people live as if in a dream state.If you're ready to write off people on the fringes of society, then you probably won't appreciate this book. Like he did in "Angels," Johnson takes these forgotten people, and makes them live and breathe on the page. Many times, his characters seem more truly alive than those who would write them off or forget about them.
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