The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Victor Lodato Reads Denis Johnson

September 1, 2025·1 hr 31 min·5 clips

Victor Lodato reveals how Denis Johnson's work explores the spiritual aspects of suffering and the pull toward ecstasy.

The frame is clean and quiet. Deborah Treisman names the podcast's monthly setup, then brings in Victor Lodato as the guest writer who chose Denis Johnson's "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" from the archive. Amelia Island comes up first as sponsorship. After the opening, the episode turns to the story's March 2014 publication and the fact that Denis died three years later. Lodato speaks with a low-key familiarity. The excerpt keeps only a little of his explanation, but it includes Treisman asking whether he read the story when it first appeared. Then Johnson's story takes over. Its first line, about touching a receiver and wondering whether it is a mistake, sets a nervous tone before the longer passage begins. Tony becomes the person everything bends around. The narrator remembers Tony's suspicion of formal art training, his choice to stop signing his work, and his pleasure in the odd comedy he finds in scripture. The humor turns fast. Tony's line about a catastrophic universe lands differently after the narrator learns that Tony has fallen from the nation's highest concrete beam bridge into Pine Valley Creek. The details are exact but strange. The bridge's name, its height, and the mechanic's technical wording sit next to the narrator's failure to remember the mechanic's name. Grief gets practical in the most uncomfortable way. Two women hand the narrator a three-ring binder of Tony's mother's recipes, treating him as the person who should get it to Elaine. The binder will not fit anywhere. That tiny problem gives the scene its sting, leaving the narrator to carry someone else's household relic home in his hands. The episode ends with credits. Treisman names Lodato's novels, sends listeners to earlier fiction readings and the Writer's Voice podcast, and closes in the show's steady style.

As heard by us

A restrained Johnson reading where grief gathers through odd jokes, domestic leftovers, and details too precise to be merely decorative.

Victor Lodato reads Johnson's "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" with a calm that lets the story's unease accumulate. Deborah Treisman gives just enough frame: Lodato first met the piece in the magazine, returned to it in Johnson's final collection, and speaks as someone…

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Hear Victor Lodato read Dennis Johnson's "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" and revisit why it felt like a gift to read again.

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