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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2015, 320 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2016, 336 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Elena Spagnolie
Buy This Book
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed and bestselling novel The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is one of America's most provocative and powerful authors. In Fortune Smiles - his first book since Orphan Master - he continues to give voice to characters rarely heard from, while offering something we all seek from fiction: a new way of looking at our world.
In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. "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. "Nirvana," which won the prestigious Sunday Times short story prize, portrays a programmer whose wife has a rare disease finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States. In "Hurricanes Anonymous" - first included in the Best American Short Stories anthology - a young man searches for the mother of his son in a Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 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.
Unnerving, riveting, and written with a timeless quality, these stories confirm Johnson as one of America's greatest writers and an indispensable guide to our new century.
Excerpt
Fortune Smiles
It's late, and I can't sleep. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn't help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the president, because we often talk in whispers. I know the whispering sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her head- phones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one.
My sleep problem is this: when I close my eyes, I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she's paralyzed from the shoulders down. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Charlotte of that. She slept on her side today, to fight the bedsores, and there was something about the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The bed is voice-activated, so if she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, "incline" is ...
National Book Awards
2015
Overall, Johnson's storytelling is exceptional, both in subject and style. His writing is audacious and he knows how to use difficult subjects as a way of exposing life's complexities, rather than for cheap shock value. I highly recommend Fortune Smiles to readers who appreciate multifaceted characters and strong, emotive writing that crackles with creativity, though not to the faint of heart...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
In "Nirvana," the opening story in Adam Johnson's Fortune Smiles, the main character's wife, Charlotte, is paralyzed from the shoulders down. She lies in bed and listens to the rock band Nirvana, as if the band's frontman, Kurt Cobain, was the only person who could understand her despair.
"It's not you," she says. "I just need my music. Just put [the headphones] on me." "Why do you need Nirvana? What is it to you?" She closes her eyes and shakes her head. "What is it with this Kurt Cobain?" I say. "What's your deal with him?" ...I turn on a computer and download one of these Nirvana albums. I play the whole thing, just sitting there in the dark. The guy, Kurt Cobain, sings about being stupid and dumb and unwanted. ...He has a ...
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