Recommendations
Books Like Tree of Smoke
Best books to read after Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is the National Book Award-winning Vietnam War novel — Skip Sands, the CIA, 1963-1983. These recommendations continue the Johnson canon, explore the Vietnam War literature tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the morally serious American war novel.
- 1Buy
Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson
The essential Johnson shorter fiction — eleven stories narrated by a nameless junkie, Johnson's most celebrated earlier work, the natural companion to Tree of Smoke for readers who want more of his voice in concentrated form.
- 2Buy
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
The other great American Vietnam War literary fiction — the company of Alpha platoon carrying their physical and emotional burdens, O'Brien's formally inventive, semi-autobiographical Vietnam novel at a smaller and more concentrated scale than Tree of Smoke.
- 3Buy
Going After Cacciato
by Tim O'Brien
O'Brien's National Book Award winner — Paul Berlin fantasizing that his unit is following the soldier Cacciato who has walked away from the war toward Paris, the formal experiment that preceded The Things They Carried.
- 4Buy
Matterhorn
by Karl Marlantes
The comprehensive combat Vietnam War novel — Lieutenant Waino Mellas and Bravo Company in the Quang Tri Province, Marlantes's thirty-years-in-the-writing novel the most technically detailed and the most morally serious of the major Vietnam War combat novels.
- 5Buy
Dispatches
by Michael Herr
The nonfiction Vietnam War companion — Herr's correspondent memoir that defined the literary language for describing the Vietnam War experience, the book that influenced Apocalypse Now and that Johnson was responding to in Tree of Smoke.
- 6Buy
A Bright Shining Lie
by Neil Sheehan
The nonfiction Vietnam War biography companion — John Paul Vann and the American military's self-deception in Vietnam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative nonfiction account that most directly parallels Tree of Smoke's concern with the gap between institutional rhetoric and reality.
- 7Buy
The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Vietnamese perspective Vietnam War novel — a communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army, Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel giving the perspective that Tree of Smoke's American CIA protagonist cannot access.
- 8Buy
Seek
by Denis Johnson
Johnson's nonfiction companion — journalism covering wars and disasters in Liberia, Somalia, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, the nonfiction equivalent of Tree of Smoke's moral seriousness and its portrait of Americans seeking meaning in dangerous places.
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