Denis Johnson

"Emergency" comes from Johnson's novel-in-stories Jesus' Son, which was made into a movie starring Billy Crudup. (Jack Black played Georgie and Denis Johnson himself played the guy with the knife in the eye. Watch the scene.)

Tobias Wolff reads the story and offers his commentary on it in this podcast from the New Yorker site.

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, claims to have read the book 300 times.

Johnson once said, “My ear for the diction and rhythms of poetry was trained by — in chronological order — Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and T. S. Eliot. Other influences come and go, but those I admire the most and those I admired the earliest (I still admire them) have something to say in every line I write. I don’t like William Faulkner. I think Wallace Stevens writes like the photograph of a person, not a person. But they too have had their effect on me.”