Fortune Smiles
Stories
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The National Book Award–winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Master’s Son offers something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the world.
“MASTERFUL.”—The Washington Post “ENTRANCING.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “PERCEPTIVE AND BRAVE.”—The New York Times
Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear.
In “Nirvana,” a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finds solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In “Hurricanes Anonymous,” a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine” follows a former warden of a Stasi prison in East Germany who vehemently denies his past, even as pieces of it are delivered in packages to his door. And in the unforgettable title story, Johnson returns to his signature subject, North Korea, depicting two defectors from Pyongyang who are trying to adapt to their new lives in Seoul, while one cannot forget the woman he left behind.
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • USA Today
AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Marie Claire • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • BuzzFeed • The Daily Beast • Los Angeles Magazine • The Independent • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews
“Remarkable . . . Adam Johnson is one of America’s greatest living writers.”—The Huffington Post
“Haunting, harrowing . . . Johnson’s writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring.”—USA Today
“Fortune Smiles [blends] exotic scenarios, morally compromised characters, high-wire action, rigorously limber prose, dense thickets of emotion, and, most critically, our current techno-moment.”—The Boston Globe
“Johnson’s boundary-pushing stories make for exhilarating reading.”—San Francisco Chronicle
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Prisons—spiritual, metaphorical, and real—are at the heart of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Adam Johnson’s intricate and jewellike stories. Many of the characters in his collection, including a pedophile plagued by guilt, a former Stasi prison warden who rationalizes his crimes, and two feckless North Korean defectors unable to appreciate their freedom in South Korea, aren’t exactly people you’d want living across the street from you. And yet, Johnson manages to pull off a magnificent trick, coloring each persona with a deft mixture of hope and shame. Fortune Smiles is dark enough that it puts you through the emotional wringer, but Johnson’s stories end up making you believe that, in the end, all human beings are redeemable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize winning novel? For Johnson (The Orphan Master's Son), the answer is a story collection, and the tales within are hefty and memorable. Johnson goes deep (and long there are only six pieces in this 300 pager) into unknown worlds. In the title story, two North Korean criminals adjust to post-defection life in South Korea; in "Nirvana," a man deals with his wife's illness by creating an app that lets people talk to the (fictional) recently assassinated president. Johnson lets us spend time with an East German prison commander whose former office is a tour stop in a "museum of torture"; a man coping with hurricanes Katrina and Rita and an array of personal problems; and, in "Dark Meadow," the highlight of a very strong collection, a pedophile trying to behave himself in the face of a variety of temptations. What these very different stories have in common is their assurance: the environments Johnson creates, along with the often problematic choices their inhabitants make, are totally believable. Escaping back to North Korea by balloon? Sure. Going to AA meetings because they offer child care? Makes sense if your ex has just dumped a toddler on you in post-Rita Lake Charles. Often funny, even when they're wrenchingly sad, the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sink into worlds we otherwise would know little or nothing about, ones we might even cross the street to avoid.
