Corpus Christi - Couverture souple

A gorgeous, accomplished debut. (David Mitchell The Independent (Books of the Year))

Stunning and complex... It's hurricane country, and Johnston's exquisitely drawn men and women are riders on the storm, coping with an iffy emotional landscape that mirrors Corpus Christi's own, where the past is too easily washed away and the ocean has no memory. (Los Angeles Times)

Hard-eyed, life-affirming... These stories are relentlessly sober, large-hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C. S. Lewis on Chaucer, "every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy" (The Allegory of Love); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last. (Boston Sunday Globe)

Fans of Raymond Carver's spare, carefully crafted stories will rejoice... [Johnston has] a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and a dead-on eye for conjuring an entire universe with one simple detail... His ten stories are individual gems... Johnston's genius lies in weaving a web of optimism around a series of difficult topics. If [these stories] are read as they seem destined to be - obsessively, in one sitting - their rapt audience will turn the last page with a profound sense of calm. (San Francisco Chronicle)

In the mold of Denis Johnson, Ian McEwan, and Barry Gifford, Johnston is a writer of stories that peel away the soul of a man, sometimes with quaking fingers, other times with a hunting knife. The stories are sometimes spastically violent, other times uncommonly delicate, but always memorable. (Pages)

Compelling and haunting... Johnston's evocative descriptions of events, feelings, and Corpus Christi itself connect readers to his characters and their dilemmas and reactions to tragedy. (Library Journal)

[A] promising debut collection... astutely observed... Johnston's Corpus is America in microcosm. But it is the emotional landscape that interests the author, not the physical, and, without lapsing into sentimentality, he evokes a peculiarly American brand of abject loneliness and tentative optimism. (Publishers Weekly)

The world that Johnston brings us into is at once familiar and oddly surreal, for the author writes with great attention to detail and nuance. (Kirkus Reviews)

[Bret Anthony Johnston is] a fresh young writer from Texas who writes as if he's a wise old man from the hard cities of the heart. His honesty is a beacon to the soul. (Chris Offutt Tin House)

Beautifully written... Johnston's stories extract truth through their bittersweet tone. (Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City))