Train Dreams

Train Dreams is a novella by Denis Johnson. It was published on August 30, 2011, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was originally published, in slightly different form, in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review. The novella details the life of Robert Grainier, an American railroad laborer, who lives a life of hermitage until he marries and has a daughter, only to lose both wife and child in a forest fire, and sink into isolation again. The novella won an O. Henry Award in 2003. It also won the 2002 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. It was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but no award was given that year. Plot In summer 1917, a Chinese laborer is accused of stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle. Robert Grainier and the other white laborers attempt to throw him over the bridge they are constructing, but he escapes. Grainier stops in Meadow Creek and buys a bottle of sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, and their four-month-old daughter, Kate. Hiking home to his cabin, Grainier thinks he sees the Chinese man and believes he has cursed him.