Denis Johnson

A New York Times Notable Book An Esquire Best Book of 2011 A New Yorker Favorite Book of 2011 A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2011 Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this novella by the National Book Award--winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

A Novella

Train Dreams

Sarah Christine Gill

The engine was an old wood-burning steam colossus throbbing and booming and groaning while its vapors roared like a falls, the horses over on the skid road moving gigantically in a kind of silence, their noises erased by the commotion of steam and machinery. From the landing the logs went onto railroad flatcars, and then across the wondrous empty depth of Robinson Gorge and down the mountain to the link with all the railways of the American continent.

He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall...Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening's program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant. 

Do you think I was scared? Well, I was. She'll be blood-drunk and running along the roads talking in your own voice, Mr. Peterson, is what he says to me. 

“It takes a great much of pulling," he'd explain to anyone helping him, closing his eyes and entering a darkness of bone torment, “more than that - pull harder a great deal of pulling now, greater, greater, you just have to pull .." until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp. 

The wolves and coyotes howled without letup all night, sounding in the hundreds, more than Grainier had ever heard, and maybe other creatures too, owls, - what, exactly, he couldn't guess - surely every single animal with a voice along the peaks and ridges looking down on the Moyea River, as if nothing could ease any of God's beasts. Grainier didn't dare to sleep, feeling it all to be some sort of vast pronouncement, maybe the alarms of the end of the world. 

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