The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories is a 2018 short story collection by Denis Johnson. It was published posthumously on January 16, 2018, by Random House. It consists of five short stories, three of which were previously published in "The New Yorker" and "Playboy". Johnson finished the collection a few weeks before his death in May 2017. The book was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Audiobook. For the audiobook, the five stories were individually read by five notable actors. "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" is  read by Nick Offerman, "The Starlight on Idaho" by Michael Shannon, "Strangler Bob" by Dermot Mulroney, "Triumph Over the Grave" by Will Patton, and "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist" by Liev Schreiber. Reception. At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the collection received a cumulative "Rave" rating based on 38 reviews: 31 "Rave" reviews, 6 "Positive" reviews, and 1 "Mixed" review. "Publishers Weekly" gave the collection a rave review, deeming it "an instant classic" and calling it "a masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose." Maureen Corrigan of NPR praised the collection , singling out "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" and "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist" as "out-of-this-world" and concluding that the collection "contains the kind of work every writer would like to go out on: fresh, profound and singular. It affirms literature's promise to believers, the gift of eternal voice."