"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.
[12][13] Publishers Weekly gave the collection a rave review, deeming it "an instant classic" and calling it "a masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose.
"[16] Sandy English of the World Socialist Web Site regarded the collection as "perhaps Johnson's best work" in which the themes "responded, in his own way, to the changes in American life in the last quarter century.
"[17] William Giraldi of The Washington Post placed Johnson among the masters of 20th-century short story writers: "Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver.
But it's a perfect word to describe Johnson's fiction, which overflows with creative energy, moving from one beauty to another with a mercurial, at times almost chaotic grace.
Social critic Sandy English writes: "It is not a surprise that mystical and semi-religious elements, always present in Johnson's work, are more pronounced in Largesse of the Sea Maiden.
I'm just improvising and adapting, and in that case I suspect the story's course reflects the process of trying to make it...I get in a teacup and start paddling across the little pond and say, 'In seven weeks, I'll land on Mars.'
"—Denis Johnson in a 2014 email to literary critic David L. Ulin[21] Author Kevin Zambrano writes: "This grimy religiosity is more in keeping with Jesus' Son, but like every story in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, it is also fixated on death.
Critic Kevin Zambrano notes that "like "Beverly Home," "The Starlight on Idaho" takes its name from a rehab clinic, and Dundun, a character from Jesus' Son, reappears in "Strangler Bob" as part of a triad of jailhouse companions" in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden.
[27][28][29] Three of the stories in the 2018 collection diverge from Jesus' Son in that Johnson presents "aging bourgeois professionals, dislocated less from society...Gone are flying women, flowers from Andromeda, crazy explanations for everything.
"[30][31] Social critic Sandy English offers a similar assessment: In The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the world, on the surface, is more stable than in either Jesus' Son or the novel Tree of Smoke (2007).
[32]"People die in Jesus' Son, most of them on accident; in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, they're murdered, they hang themselves, their corpses are exhumed by mad poets.
Critic Anthony Domestico writes: "The main thing linking The Largesse of the Sea Maiden to Jesus's Son are his sentences...it's the sentences—those adamantine, poetic sentences—that made him one of America's great and lasting writers.