Train Dreams

Robert Grainier is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century, working on logging crews and railroad gangs in the Idaho Panhandle and across the border in Washington. Brought to Fry, Idaho, as a small boy, he marries Gladys and builds a cabin in the valley for her and their infant daughter, Kate, while taking work wherever the timber and the rail lines take him.

When a wildfire sweeps through the valley while he is away, Grainier is left to carry on alone. Over the decades that follow he lives at the edge of a frontier that is disappearing around him, as the old forests come down and the railroads open the country up.

Denis Johnson's novella first appeared in The Paris Review in 2002 and was published as a book by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011. It was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a year in which no prize was awarded, and was adapted as a feature film in 2025.