When I say Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella Train Dreams is the kind of book my grandpa would like, I mean it in the most complimentary way possible.

My grandpa, like a lot of Greatest Generation grandpas, experienced much in his lifetime—he lived through the Great Depression, served in World War II, witnessed Vietnam, Watergate and the technological leaps of the early 2000s—but never processed those experiences externally. He liked stories about people who lived simple, often hard existences. He liked characters who got through their lives a day at a time while wondering about the world around them in small, introspective ways.

Johnson’s story of Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker living in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century, is characterized by spare, matter-o

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