Fortune Smiles
Ratings8
Average rating4
15
Ratings8
Average rating4
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
Reviews with the most likes.
Many of the 6 were disturbing but so well written and complicated that I couldn't stop thinking about each story long after I had finished it. Technical complaint on thr audiobook: The first story had really bad sound quality and the narrator's voice echoed. I've never experienced that in any other audiobook I've listened to. If it was on purpose than that's pretty creepy! The other narrator's were perfect matches to their story. Liked hearing a few familiar voices.
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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If that doctor’s right, Nonc’s dad is going to die for sure this time. But the truth is, it’s just an event. Life’s full of events—they occur and you adjust, you roll and move on. But at some point, like when your girlfriend Marnie tells you she’s pregnant, you realize that some events are actually developments. You realize there’s a big plan out there you know nothing about, and a development is a first step in that new direction.
This is a collection of short stories—longer than most short stories I end up talking about here, but not novella length by any means. I’m not remotely sure how to describe the book or the themes as a whole…I guess I could steal that line from Semisonic, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” These stories occupy the overlap of the new beginning and the end of the other beginnings.
Nirvana
Loss. Personal Grief. Dealing with disease, AI, and national grief. It was funny and gut-wrenching at the same time. I didn’t expect effective and affecting speculative fiction to start this collection (I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but definitely not that), but it was a dynamite start and raised my expectations for the rest.
Hurricanes Anonymous
This is not your typical post-natural disaster story. I don’t know what to say beyond that. I mean, I guess you could say there are somethings that are worse than the devastation a hurricane leaves in its wake—and we see at least one example of it here.
Other than to note the above quotation, the only thing I wrote about this was “I really don’t know what to think of it, but I’m glad I read it.” That kind of applies to the collection as a whole, but it really describes my reaction to this story.
Interesting Facts
This was hard to read—the emotions are so raw. This story is about the collapse of a marriage and the damage cancer wreaks—on the lives of the person with it and those around them.
George Orwell was a Friend of Mine
Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall—and everything that went with that—we spend some time watching the former Warden of a Stasi prison. His wife has left him, his adult daughter is having questions about him, and he’s still trying to adjust to the world he finds himself in and what the world thinks of his former career.
This was powerful stuff. I don’t know what else to say—for the longest time, you find yourself pulling for a guy you’d typically think was a monster (thankfully, while never thinking he was a stand-up guy). And then…well, maybe your perspective shifts a bit.
Darkness Falls
I could not finish this one—I’m willing to believe that there’s a decent ending to this, and there was a compelling reason to deal with this amount of darkness. But, I just couldn’t finish it because of the subject matter.
Fortune Smiles
This story is about a couple of North Korean men who defected to the South (one willingly, the other possibly less-so). Culture shock isn’t the right way to describe what they’re going through. I hope this doesn’t come across as dismissive—but it’s almost like Brooks Hatlen’s time after being paroled in The Shawshank Redemption, that’s the quickest way I have to describe their adjustment.
This story is just stunningly good, and it makes sense that the collection is named for it.
This wasn’t a collection I could sit down and read back-to-back stories in. Frequently I had to take a day or more off between them (and sometimes I ended up taking more for other reasons)—Allyson Johnson’s recent WWW Wednesday comments* indicate that I’m not the only one who reacts this way.
* I’m expecting her to tell me how wrong I am about “Darkness Falls,” incidentally.
The stories, the points of view, the characters, circumstances, etc., etc., etc. are so varied from story to story that it’s hard to consider them as a collection. But here’s a few takeaways:
I don’t know what else to say beyond that I’m glad Allyson put this on my radar, and I’m definitely recommending 5/6 of this to you all.
Originally posted at irresponsiblereader.com.
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