Fortune Smiles: Stories

Well written, tackles difficult subjects. -- and new ones-- in a creative way. Range of characters with different voices and from different cultures.Some stories were easier to get involved in than others, in my view. Five stories in all but I only finished three of them.

Well written, tackles difficult subjects. -- and new ones-- in a creative way. Range of characters with different voices and from different cultures.Some stories were easier to get involved in than others, in my view. Five stories in all but I only finished three of them.

Adam Johnson is one of the most impressive writers, in terms of style, content, and originality, I’ve come across in the last decade. His ability to use humor to capture dislocated souls in a dystopian world that is not the future but NOW is unparalleled and points to another master of this type of fiction, George Saunders.

My favorite story, “Nirvana,” is about a man trying to nurse his wife, bedridden from an autoimmune disease (she listens to the band Nirvana through her earbuds to medicate herself from her physical and mental agony) while working at a Silicon Valley tech company, Reputation Curator, which “threatens Yelpers and Facebookers to retract negative comments about dodgy lawyers and incompetent dentists.” In a slightly future America teeming with drones and hologram figures that can’t be distinguished from real people, the story captures the absurdity and cognitive dissonance we live in today.

The most disturbing and courageous story, “Dark Meadow,” is about a former online purveyor of children who, struggling with his past demons, tries to redeem himself by using his computer hacking skills to expose online child predators.

The two aforementioned stories are my favorites and worth the price of admission, but there are other treasures including “Hurricanes Anonymous” about a single father driving a UPS truck with his infant (abandoned by the mother) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and “Fortune Smiles,” about two North Korean misfits living in the popular culture of South Korea.

These six stories highlight one of our best novelists and short story writers. Highly recommended.

Fresh off of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Orphan Master's Son, author Adam Johnson is back with an eclectic collection of short stories. Each of the six selections offers a unique tale of a character struggling to come to terms with the realities and challenges of their lives. Johnson highlights these ethical dilemmas with his quietly assured writing.

In Nirvana, a husband struggles to cope with his wife's crippling Guillain–Barré syndrome. The couple lives in the not too distant future where technology such as Android glasses and Google lanes are commonplace. To help endure the emotional effects of his wife's physical condition, he programs an iProjector hologram of the recently assassinated U.S. President to interact with. He seeks a friend, someone to talk to about his misfortune. The hologram communicates by using bits and pieces of recordings of the President's media appearances, so any "advice" that the husband receives, comes in the form of hollow political sentiments.

Hurricane Anonymous follows Randall, a UPS truck driver living in New Orleans during the immediate aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He is thrust into fatherhood when his young son is left at the foot of his UPS truck. With no note as to the mother's whereabouts, Randall continues to drive his routes while searching for his son's mother. Meanwhile, his mute father is on his deathbed, and his current girlfriend wants to run away with him and start a new life with their FEMA money. Randall does everything in his power to provide for his family as each of them pulls him in different directions.

In the most personal story in the collection, Interesting Facts, Johnson assumes the voice of a wife facing the effects of breast cancer on her family. Physically and emotionally scarred by the double mastectomy that saved her life, the woman attempts to put the pieces of her life back together. She finds it difficult to accept the affection of her husband. How can he find her attractive after her surgery? Even worse, as an aspiring author herself, she enviously resents the success of her Pulitzer Prize winning spouse. The fact that Johnson's wife is a breast cancer survivor is not lost on the reader as this portrait of marital disillusionment unfolds.

In George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine and Fortune Smiles, Johnson explores the effects of totalitarian political regimes on the people who enforce and live under them. The first tells the story of a retired warden of the East German Hohenschonhausen Prison. He lives close to the infamous facility, now a museum, and remains adamant that he participated in no wrong doing during his tenure there. He befriends the museum curator and agrees to tell his side of the institution's history. Johnson dexterously illustrates the man's belief in an invented reality that is built upon denial and fear.

He further grapples with these themes in the title story. DJ and Sun-ho are facing the steep task of acclimating to life as liberated citizens of Korea. Years of oppression under the Northern Regime have left them weary of the freedoms their Southern counterparts enjoy. They find simple pleasure in fast-food restaurants and scratch-off lottery tickets. Still, the elder Sun-ho can't change his ways as easily as DJ. He knows that life in the North was unacceptable, but years of living there have stained his impression of the place that he now calls home. Both of these historical stories prove Johnson's skill as an author and provide examples of all the things that he truly excels at.

The most intriguing story in this collection has to be Dark Meadows. The narrator is a man so riddled by the distinction between right and wrong that he can barely come to terms with either one. He was raped as a child and never fully recovered from the incident. Now, as a computer technician, he occasionally services the hard drives of child pornographers while simultaneously installing malware that makes their illegal activities easier to track. In a narrative that is disturbing, tragic, and surprisingly sympathetic, Johnson writes of this broken man who precariously walks the line between criminal scum and sorrowful victim.

Be it the tale of a woman facing illness or a child pornographer, a liberated citizen or an unrelenting war criminal, Johnson writes with a sincere conviction that allows readers to form independent opinions of each of his characters. Despite the varying backgrounds and situations they face, the characters in this collection are all fighting for the kind of personal victories that every human can relate to. As a cohesive unit, Fortune Smiles, offers masterful contemplations on life and the human condition that all readers can appreciate.

I received this book free for review from the author or publisher in exchange for an honest review. Despite the privilege of receiving a free book, I’m absolutely candid about it below because I believe authors and readers will benefit most from honest reviews rather than the typical vacuous 5-star reviews.

This book is comprised of six very dark but very different stories. The protagonists range from child pornographer to North Korean defector to cancer patients. In each case, the characters are facing some key turning point in their lives, for better or worse.

Years ago Johnson's previous novel, "The Orphan Master's Son" son, showed up on my doorstep as an ARC for review
and after reading it I kept the book around when I usually give away my ARCs to other readers. Similarly with "Fortune Smiles" I felt like this book was one to keep on the shelf forever. Johnson's first three stories are breathtaking and kept me up late to finish them. His characters are so bold and candidly portrayed that you can't peel your eyes off of them wondering what they're going to do next. The stories are solid, gripping and original as well as potent and unforgiving in their honesty to the darkness they portray.

To the negative, the last half of the book, while still entertaining, does tend to flag a bit. The stories of North Korean defectors and an ex-warden in an East German political prison camp were certainly timely but failed to hold my attention as keenly. Perhaps I had become accustomed to Johnson's style again but I didn't feel quite as pulled along as I did with the first three stories.

In summary, at least in part this series of stories is a masterpiece. It is brutal and deals with people at their absolute basest level. It unapologetically paints portraits that make the reader cringe and yet also nod with some element of recognition.

PS: I hope my review was helpful. If it was not, then please let me know what I left out that you’d want to know. I always aim to improve.

Fortune Smiles presents six short stories, each narrated by a different voice which lends authenticity to the whole. Each of the narrators on the audio does an admirable job regarding accent, tone and emphasis. The characters take on a shape and personality that the listener can identify with and understand, if not, perhaps, like. All of the stories contain an element of humor, but that humor is sometimes dark and very subtle. In each story, someone is suffering or has caused suffering. In each story, someone is trying to come to terms with issues that confront them. Some are more successful than others. Johnson shows us how each of us views life through a different lens. Each of us makes a choice that leads us in one direction or another. Each of us has that choice to make, for good or ill. The book itself takes its title from the name of a Chinese Lottery in which everyone can be a winner. So that, too, is about choices made. All of the tickets have a winning combination; it is a scratch off ticket which will produce a winner every time if the scratcher scratches off the correct combination.
The first short story, Nirvana, is read by Jonathan McClain. A young husband has created a hologram of a recently assassinated, beloved president which has become enormously popular and appears everywhere. He talks to his hologram in order to relieve his stress. Meanwhile, his wife lies in a bed that is voice activated as she is suffering from a disease called Guillain-Barre Syndrome. She was expected to make a complete recovery from the paralysis that has overtaken her life, but so far, there has been no evidence of an improvement in her condition. He greatly fears that she will end her own life if she can figure out how to do it. All day she listens to the music of Kurt Cobain and his album called Nirvana. To ease her stress, and in order to ease his fear of her committing suicide, he creates something for her too, something that will give her the will to live, something to make her understand what her suicide would represent to others. Will it work? Will she understand why it is important to live or has she always understood?
In Hurricanes Anonymous, read by Dominic Hoffman, the New Orleans area recovering from the result of two devastating hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. A UPS driver, “Nonc” Randall Richard, makes deliveries to the flood ravaged area. After one delivery, he returns to his truck and discovers a child there, but he has no idea who has put him there. The child’s name is Geronimo. Geronimo’s mother, Marnie, has been raising him. Nonc, his father, has had little contact with him. Nonc is drawn to the child, and he immediately recognizes his responsibility but assumes it is going to be quite temporary. However, they bond, and become a part of each other’s lives.
At the same time that Geronimo appeared in his life, Nonc is told that his father is dying. They are estranged, but as Nonc and his girlfriend, Relle, try to get their lives together, hoping to keep Geronimo in their picture, they set off for California to his dad’s deathbed. The reader is left wondering if fortune will smile on all of them. Can Geronimo trust Nonc to return, Can Nonc trust Cherelle to stand by her end of the bargain, can he trust his father’s offer? Will he get there before his dad dies? Will UPS forgive his transgression? Nonc thinks of life as a series of events, from some you move on, but some he considers developments which push you in a new direction. Is this a development? Will he find a new direction?
Interesting Facts, is read by Cassandra Campbell, a very talented narrator. In the story, Charlotte dreams that she has cancer. Shortly after, she has a double mastectomy which forces her to think about her life, how it has changed and how she can adjust. She becomes very introspective, and her story is intense. She becomes obsessed with the breasts of others. She wonders about her husband’s fidelity. She wonders if he will find another women if she dies. Who will raise her children and love them as she does? She stops, often, in her monologue, and says, interesting facts, a comment her daughter used to make before her illness, but does no longer. She thinks about death, dead wives and what they leave behind. She thinks about her unpublished novels. Once, a professor told her to write about what she knew, and when her husband, a successful writer, decides to use a character from one of her stories for his next novel, she reacts with anger. This is what she knows! Is she no longer relevant? This is her story, not his. Are his or the children’s reactions to her illness appropriate? Will she only be a story to her children in the end, as she has concluded? Is she afraid of being forgotten? Will her story give meaning to her life? As cancer is a disease that cannot be contained, so is the title she has decided for her own story, Toucan Cereal. The title is meaningless. Does that indicate that she thinks her life is meaningless as she contemplates her mortality?
In George Orwell Was A Friend of Mine, read by W. Morgan Shepherd, we meet Hans, a former prison warden at an infamous Stasi prison in East Germany which was run by the Russians. The prison has been closed for several years and is now a memorial to the suffering that took place there. Hans believes he is innocent of any wrongdoing since all he did was make sure the prison ran efficiently. Abandoned by his wife, Gitte, and his daughter because of discoveries they have made about him, he is confused by the sudden appearance of packages on his property representing gifts he had previously given to his wife and daughter. He seems cruel and detached from what went on at the prison, seeming to have a blind eye to its horrors. His personality is so Germanic, cold and detached; he seems to believe that he just did his job and maintained the prison efficiently. He treats his little dog, Prince, very well, in stark contrast to the way the prisoners were treated under his watch. He denies the accusations of torture there and claims ignorance about what went on. Slowly, does he begin to recognize anything that should have concerned him while he was there? He still carries keys to prison rooms on his belt, so is there any real hope for him to see the light?
When he goes on a tour with a former prisoner, he is forced to face his past, but does he? Berta tells him that her suffering in prison caused her “to travel far away in her mind’” in order to get through the days. Does he come to believe that if he suffers, as his wife once did, perhaps he can locate her? Is it only after he stops feeling anything in his body that he is able to feel anything emotionally?
Dark Meadow is read by Will Damron. It is the story of a pedophile who is trying desperately to reform. He cannot contain his urges, but can he redirect them? Raped and photographed by the skipper of his sea scouts group, as a little boy, he has been irrevocably damaged. Dark Meadow is the nickname that the skipper gave him. He gave all the boys nicknames.
He is a very savvy computer expert and he is often called on to repair them. He is known in the world of child porn and has written an article advising those aficionados of child porn that once they sign onto certain sites, their identities are captured by the authorities. Is he trying to warn them or stop them? He is approached by law enforcement to help track down the pornographers who abuse little children by providing them with a code. Will he help? Does he find a way to turn his affliction into something good?
His neighbors across the street are two young girls. They are afraid of a Peeping Tom. Can he help them safe or will they tempt him? What choices will he make? At one point, Kurt Cobain reappears in this story. The girls sing about a girl who goes alone into the woods. It is a Cobain song. In his article he might have warned the child pornographers about the signal on their computer, can he now warn the officers by providing them with the signal code to capture them? Can he change his role to a protector of children?
In Fortune Smiles, read by Greg Chun, two men have escaped to North Korea, one willingly and one tricked into doing it. DJ was told that he had to leave South Korea, but he wouldn’t leave without his close friend, an older man named Sun-Ho. They had always worked together and protected each other. He tricked him into running with him. In North Korea, they were engaged in selling goods that were obtained illegally. However, the illegality occurred in several other countries before the merchandise reached them, so they didn’t feel guilty. It was simply the way things were done in their country.
In South Korea, DJ lives in a male dormitory, attends meetings designed to help him adjust to his new life and is provided with funds to live. Sun Ho does not attend his meetings. He tells stories about the life he is leading in South Korea, explaining that he goes to meetings with rich women in fancy neighborhoods. Sun Ho is infatuated with a girl, Willow, a girl who is unattainable who is in North Korea. In truth, he cannot adjust and thinks of returning to North Korea, to the life he knows, to the people he knows. Sun Ho does not let obstacles stand in his way. He cannot see himself living in this capitalistic society.DJ, on the other hand, enjoys the democratic way of life and has made a friend, Mina. She is searching for her husband who abandoned her in North Korea, stealing everything from her before he left. She loved the beauty of the landscape of North Korea; DJ loved the darkness at night. While DJ enjoys his new found freedom, Sun-Ho seems to resent it. He prefers obedience and strict rules, rules which he can break, oddly enough. He continues his old wayward ways in South Korea.
The Fortune Smiles lottery, which gives this story its name, gives everyone an equal chance to win. DJ understands that message. Sun Ho does not. In North Korea, they had produced counterfeit lottery tickets. Is it even possible for Sun Ho ever to adjust? Will he come to understand the benefit of having the freedom to make one’s own decisions? Having never had to make his own creative decisions before, is he perhaps too old to make them now? Johnson has gotten into the minds of his characters, expertly even as a male, in the mind of the female breast cancer sufferer. His insight is detailed and perceptive. Will fortune smile on any of the characters in these well-crafted stories? It is up to the reader to decide.

Complete/original review available on blog, HereWeAreGoing, here: https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/reading-because-elizabeth-mccracken-and-twitter/

This is the 2015 National Book Award Winner for Fiction and is a collection of short stories. I liked it well enough but, truth, I am still bitter that Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck and Other Stories didn’t win the 2014 award. So, in order for me to really like a short-story collection, it would need to rise to the level of genius I found in Thunderstruck, and while there was much to admire in Fortune Smiles, he’s no Ms. McCracken, which I realize is a shallow review of a work much-loved by many. Like I said, I did think some of the stories very nicely done but I was not emotionally moved by any of them, rather, they seemed long on technique and short on real feeling.

After reading The Orphan Master’s Son, I wanted to read the other books by Adam Johnson because I admired his writing. Thus, Fortune Smiles became the next book in line.

There are six long stories in this book: Nirvana, Hurricanes Anonymous, Interesting Facts, George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine, Dark Meadow, and Fortune Smiles.

Roughly speaking, Nirvana is about a man with a sick, disabled wife for whom the husband creates a drone. . Hurricanes Anonymous is about a man with a baby in Lake Charles after Hurricane Rita. Interesting Facts, my favorite, is about the resentful wife of a Pulitzer Prize winner, which seems to be inspired by the author’s life. George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine is about a German Prison Guard without a conscious who still lives near the prison, in which he once worked. Dark Meadow is about a pedophile and porn addict who lives with temptation. Fortune Smiles is about two defectors from North Korea who are having difficulties with adjusting to the life in the free South Korea.

It is not the subjects of the stories but the way this author presents them to the readers that made me admire his art even more while reading the stories. In addition, each story is different and exceptional. I can even dare to say that his short stories felt even more refined, if there could be such a thing, than this author’s Pulitzer-winning novel.

The one thing which impressed me the most in all the stories was the human side of his characters, especially within the monstrous ones. Then, all story characters experience some kind of a moral struggle no matter their circumstances or weaknesses. Some, maybe all, stories have disturbing setups but the way the author let the characters handle those situations leaves a lasting impression on the reader after a story is finished.

The author’s style of storytelling is superb, haunting, and captivating. I can easily say this is the best collection of short stories I have ever read.

FORTUNE SMILES

FORTUNE SMILES consists of six rather long short stories, all with different subjects, characters, and journeys. However, each one was dark and disturbing in their own individual ways. You will meet some odd-ball characters and some wonderful characters. Author Adam Johnson writes sharp, tough, and hard, no holds barred.

Of the six shorts, I had my favorites --

HURRICANES ANONYMOUS tells the tale of Nonc who works for UPS in Louisiana during the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He is one hell of a guy and to make his life even more complicated, he is traveling with his toddler son, Geronimo. Along with working, surviving, helping others, Nonc is searching for Geronimo's mom. It is good reading.

DARK MEADOW deals with child porn and a man deeply involved in such. He tries to help his neighbors in more ways than one and has definite and constant struggles on a daily basis. I could not help but feel for this man who wants to change his life so badly.

These shorts were good; I did love the two above mentioned the best, the others sort of fell flat for me. I know I will think of these two short stories for a long time as they hit me hard.

If you like great writing that enters your heart and soul, a different variety of characters and subjects, and an author that pulls no punches whatsoever, this is a definitely a book you would enjoy.

There's something creepy and inhuman about these short stories that matches the modern high technology age in which we live and are no longer individuals - just coded numbers being tracked 24/7 by the Internet powers-that-be.

Johnson's characters are generally not appealing – a former East German prison guard who is defiantly defensive of his job, a techie who specializes in protecting downloaders of child porn and a thuggish North Korean who accidentally “defects” to the South. Johnson shoves you into the middle of them, and you find yourself like a spectator in a sports stadium surrounded by people you would rather not be with, and leaves you to handle them.

I found the stories a bit overwhelming and suspect many readers will either love or hate them en masse or individually.

Was it Fran Lebowitz who said that she enjoyed camp until it got into the water supply? I have that same feeling about black humor, and whenever it infects Adam Johnson’s short stories in Fortune Smiles, I’m put off. It’s most off-putting in the story “Interesting Facts,” where he goes for the laughs about breast cancer.

At other times, Johnson’s touch can be exquisite, as when he captures a father’s abject affection for his infant son in “Hurricanes Anonymous.” Here’s one particularly affecting moment involving changing a diaper:

“Nonc shimmies off Geronimo’s pants, then unfastens the diaper. He tosses the thing away, even though it’s perfectly fine, not wet or anything. Geronimo starts to chill when Nonc slides a fresh diaper under him. Nonc keeps saying 'hush,' and when he asks the boy to lift his legs, Geronimo quietly obeys, holding them up and keeping them there. That’s when Nonc does his favorite part. Nonc takes the baby powder and raises it high. Very lightly, he lets it snow down. The stuff is cold and sweet-smelling. He shakes the thing, and his son’s eyes follow the dusty white powder as it slowly floats down. The boy can watch it forever.”

Johnson’s power as a writer cannot be disputed. But for this year’s National Book Award in fiction, I would have gone back to the longlist of nominees and voted for Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew.

These are dark, quirky stories. The points of view seem as removed from mainstream America as it is possible to get. They include: a UPS driver navigating among the debris and destruction of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a computer codemeister whose wife’s paralysis may or may not be permanent, the former warden of the Stasi prison in East Berlin, a second computer repairman who seeks out child pornography on the Internet, a woman who is dying (or maybe already dead) of cancer, a North Korean having second thoughts about having defected to the South.

In fact, though, these oddities are not so far from particular experiences which I, for one, can personally relate to. I have suffered temporary paralysis with an uncertain diagnosis. I have undergone treatment for cancer. When I was a child I was briefly and fairly harmlessly subjected to the attentions of a pedophile. I know more than one person who has a fondness for illicit computer pornography. My family has emigrated from one culture to another, with varying degrees of assimilation afterward. There have been times when I went along with organizational practices which I felt were wrong, simply because I was assured by my superiors that they were perfectly legal. I recognized bits of my own reality in this collection.

Johnson sprinkles some humor and a great deal of compassion through these dark stories. He enables us to look at the darkness, to acknowledge it, without giving into it. And though his characters have lost their way, they are still struggling toward the light. Despite the darkness on the fringe, there is hope here. We all have dark corners, and need to look into them.

I originally discovered these short stories through the awesome Penguin Random House weekly "Season of Stories" project, where they featured a different story daily, for a week. They happened to feature "Nirvana" & I absolutely loved it for its quirkiness & outside the box creativity. 

I decided to get the book & read the rest of Adam Johnson's works. There was an overall theme to his compilation of stories centered around loss & suffering. I've never read anything quite like it & still don't know what to think. It is certainly not for everyone, I'm not even sure it was for me. However, it without a doubt, left me feeling countless emotions. I was particularly disturbed by "Dark Meadow" but I suppose good writing provokes true emotion/feeling in a reader. So, where I may not have liked some of the content, it left me thinking & my stomach was churning about it for days after. 

I did love Interesting Facts & Hurricane Anonymous, though I felt the book's namesake, "Fortune Smiles" left much to be desired. It took me days to read it due to disinterest and what I felt to be a weak story, lacking real substance. In my personal opinion, it felt rushed & it ended the book on a low. All and all, an interesting read but I don't think I'd ever revisit the stories again. Too dark for me!

I haven't finished The Orphan Master's Son (Johnson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel), but I like the STYLE and mood of these stories a bit more than the novel.

The first writer who comes to mind as I read these stories is George Saunders. 10th of December is one of the best collections of stories I've read, and I've been yearning to find something similarly weird, compassionate, brilliant, and compelling. Fortune Smiles comes very CLOSE. Here is a quote from Junot Diaz describing SAUNDERS: "There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep." That's a really wonderful way of describing Johnson's work in these stories as well.

I suppose if I had to state (create?) a difference, I'd say that Saunders seems to have a little more HEART. Not sentimentality obviously---if you've read Saunders you know THAT'S not a problem for him…just HOPE, I suppose. "Nirvana," and the long "Hurricanes Anonymous" are, I think, the strongest stories in the collection, though I also greatly enjoyed "George Orwell Was A Friend Of Mine." Nonetheless, Johnson's worlds are tough and uncaring. The characters in them do their best with the worst but sometimes do their worst with the best. That's the tension which drives these stories.

The title of this collection is both ironic and deeply philosophical: the Latin proverb "Fortune smiles upon the brave and frowns upon the coward," MAY be what Johnson is working from, though there are obviously some other aphorisms which begin with "Fortune Smiles…" Nonetheless, in "Hurricanes Anonymous," Dr. Gaby gives advice to Nonc, the story's protagonist: "You have to choose…then you have to be one hundred percent. Don't think of it as making a choice but OBEYING one" (78 capitalization mine). So this book is filled with characters upon whom Fortune has definitively NOT smiled--hence the irony. But the beauty of the stories, as embodied in this line, is that Fortune smiles when YOU MAKE IT do so. Or maybe we can even read the title hyper-literally: the characters adapt "fortune smiles" in the face of their suffering. Johnson is showing us the only bravery we can have in the face of a demonic smiling Fortune that puts us all in situations where our choices seem few.

Adam Johnson, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer for The Orphanmaster's Son, just won the National Book Award for FORTUNE SMILES, in which his 6 stories are insightful, inventive, at times humorous, and always "prosefully" potent.

Adam Johnson seems to me the writer's equivalent to Disney's best imagineer. In the Wonderful World of his Wizardry, Adam Johnson was able to move me in ways that seem counterintuitive and for characters that I'd never have thought possible: by the plight of a North Korean recently immigrated (unwittingly) to South Korea desperately longing to return home; a former warden of an East German prison wherein the Stasi committed atrocities who appears to be suffering dementia (with psychological undertones); cringing while feeling sympathy for a pedophile who was abused as a child; being frustrated by a Louisiana alcoholic/addict a few months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita searching for his toddler's ne'er do well mom while being afflicted by a Bathsheba wanting to abandon the boy to go to Cali.

In the story "Nirvana," set in the near future, the husband tries to cope with his suicidal wife's paralysis and her desire to get pregnant. His wife is a big fan of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In trying to understand his wife's obsession with KC/Nirvana, the husband listens to some of their music and quips that he doesn't understand the song, "All Apologies," in which Cobain "never apologizes and doesn't even say what he did wrong." And, jokes to his wife, "Here we are, now entertain us," from "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Finally, the story "Interesting Facts" is narrated by a wife and mother who had a double mastectomy for breast cancer. The story is one of the most crushing I've read in a while (and it's neither mawkish nor manipulative).

While some have written that the National Book Award committee shies from bestowing the prize upon a book of short stories, the purported reason being that the buying public does not buy many short story collections. I think such book are slow sellers because the public wants a nice Hollywood beginning-middle-end. And so, they miss out on some of the most moving stories, packing an emotional punch in a more compact frame. And yet, this is the second collection of short stories awarded the NBA in the past 3 years.

Highly recommended.

That headline was one comment in our SF-based book club. Guess this book made us a bit whimsical or lyrical. We don't read a lot of books of short stories, but this one was somewhat novel-like, or more like a series of novellas (we recalled Patrick Melrose), loosely related like a "concept album" from the '60s or '70s (think Sgt. Pepper's). The six stories were unified by tone and subject matter that were edgy, dark, even creepy, and all had a strong pull. And they were interconnected a bit -- both with each other and with the author's life -- particularly in Interesting Facts, including its references to Mr. Roses and Dark Meadow. As with any group (except our book club!) there will be some that rub the wrong way or step over the line, and some of these stories did so for some of us (one even "hated" one). But as with modern portfolio theory, diversification maximized performance of the whole...

We spent some time talking about structure and its impact on perception. It took a quick re-read to realize that five of the six stories are told in present tense, lending a sense of urgency or heightened reality, and four are in the first-person, bringing each primary character closer to the reader, sometimes in a very uncomfortable way (particularly with Mr. Roses).

Of course we had to separate and rank/grade the individual stories. Nirvana seemed best-liked, and its accessible setting both geographically for us and in what seemed a fast-approaching near future made it logical as the first in the series to lure us into some further darkening content. There was also no way not to be walloped by the smell-the-roses passage, or to sympathize with wallowing in '90s grunge. The ironically eponymous final story held the greatest spread from loved to hated, maybe coincidentally or possibly somewhat related to its more traditional third-person, past-tense form subtly setting it apart from the rest. All-in this book got mostly A ratings from our group.

So buy it, enjoy it, discuss it.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Adam Johnson doesn't disappoint with this collection of short stories. "Fortune Smiles" features six stories of struggle, sorrow, courage, sickness (mental and physical), and occasional humor and deliverance. In many ways, this collection is an easier, if not quite as interesting, a read than Johnson's prize winning novel ("The Orphan Master's Son").

The opening story, the highly praised and Sunday Times' Short Story prize winning "Nirvana", is a story about living with and attempting to overcome illness and grief. The narrator's wife is suffering from Guillain-Barre syndrome with no end in sight. She takes comfort in Nirvana's music and little else. He copes by talking to a hologram (or something similar) he's created of the recently assassinated president. It's a slightly futuristic tale, but one with a lot of heart and somewhat moving in conclusion.

This is followed by "Dark Meadow", a creepy story narrated by a character both compelled and repulsed by child pornography. It's a difficult read, but strongly redeemed by the cleverly-tied following story, "Interesting Facts".

"Interesting Facts" appears to be a semi-autobiographical story told by the wife of a Pulitzer Prize winning author of a story set in North Korea. And she's a breast cancer survivor dealing with the aftermath of the brave battle she's waged and her husband's emerging success as an author (while contemplating her state and stalled attempts at writing novels herself). I found this story very compelling, infused with humanity, and humor. Truly terrific storytelling at its best.

The remaining three stories are longer and length, but of nearly equal quality to "Interesting Facts" and "Nirvana". "Hurricanes Anonymous" is the story of a UPS driver in post Katrina/Rita Lake Charles, Louisiana with a young child and girlfriend (not the child's mother) with small dreams. "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" is a mildly suspenseful story of a former Stasi prison warden (set in 2008) struggling to come to grips with his legacy. The collection concludes with "Fortune Smiles", a story of two North Korean defectors in Seoul Korea, one of whom is failing to come to terms with his departure and the girl he left behind. As with most of the stories in this excellent collection, this is a story both sad and encouraging (with mild humor).

As a whole, this is a very good and too brief collection of stories from Adam Johnson. And certainly recommended.

The six long stories in Adam Johnson's new collection, FORTUNE SMILES, only serve to reaffirm the quality of work that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2012 novel, THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON. Realistic at their heart and in their execution, Johnson's stories manage to tip our world a couple of degrees off its axis. Pairing that style with a facility for placing his credible characters in interesting predicaments yields a powerful group of tales, most of which approach novelistic depth and texture.

At the heart of this collection is the brilliant "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," a devastating story told by the former warden of East Germany's Hohenschönhausen Prison. Now retired, he spends the days walking his dog in the shadow of the facility, now converted into a museum, rationalizing that he had nothing to do with the torture inflicted by the Stasi within its walls. The story's final pages feature a confrontation, expertly paced through the use of crackling dialogue, between the narrator and one of the prison's former inmates who works as a tour guide there, in which his protestations about his own lack of involvement in torture are tested. It's impossible to read it without recalling our own recent debates about enhanced interrogation techniques.

Johnson returns to the Korean Peninsula for the collection's title story. There, DJ and Sung-ho, two North Korean defectors, find themselves struggling to adapt to their new lives in South Korea's democracy. DJ, an engineer now working as a dishwasher, had run schemes "selling false hope, fake medicine and unsafe cars" to the Chinese to generate foreign currency, while his older companion had served vaguely as his protector. In their new, strange land, their roles have reversed; when they meet Mina, a musician defector, Sung-ho makes a decision that ends the story on a surreal, but beautiful, note.

Though technology insinuates itself into most of these stories, two --- "Nirvana" and "Dark Meadow" --- have it at their center. In the former, the unnamed narrator has developed an "algorithm that scrubs the Web and describes the results into a personal animation" to bring an assassinated president back to life, at least in stilted Q&A form. Meanwhile, the programmer's wife struggles to cope with her paralysis from Guillain-Barré syndrome. Her obsession with Kurt Cobain and her husband's programming skills intersect to bring the story to a moving climax. The protagonist of "Dark Meadow," known only by that pseudonym or his screen name DM14097, is an expert in computer security and a victim of child abuse who's fighting his own addiction to child pornography while working to prevent its spread. Despite their grounding in the world of technology, Johnson never neglects the human drama at the core of these stories.

The collection's most conventional story, "Hurricanes Anonymous," was included in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2009. It follows Nonc, a young UPS deliveryman, and his two-year-old son, Geronimo, as they make their way around Lake Charles, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The boy's mother has taken a "vacation from parenthood," leaving Nonc to care for Geronimo while he must deal with his estranged father, dying in a California hospital and unable to communicate with him except through notes read by a hospital aide. Though Nonc hardly has been affected by the natural disasters, like their victims he's faced with the challenge of coping with a new life. "Developments can happen right in front of you like that, you don't even see them," Nonc remarks, the subtle tipoff to the fateful decision he will make at the end of the story.

At some point in just about every one of these stories, Johnson detonates a small charge of insight or apt language, heightening the pleasure of his storytelling. The narrator of "Interesting Facts," a breast cancer survivor who's married to a novelist who's written a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about North Korea, spends most of her time musing bitterly on how her family will think about her after she's gone. But for all her acid-tipped observations, she recognizes that "If I want them to stop treating me like a ghost, I need to stop acting like one." The museum curator in "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," watching students on the prison tour constantly check their smartphones and update their Facebook statuses, imagines how even the dreaded secret police "couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on themselves, morning, noon and night."

Despite their length, it's common when reaching the end of these stories to wish they could have gone on. Johnson's concerns are so compelling, his characters so well-drawn and his writing so perceptive that it's natural to want to prolong the pleasures he delivers. For now, we'll have to content ourselves with the next best thing: a rereading of the book to discover the new depths and textures these stories assuredly will yield.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

Although I'd never read anything by author Adam Johnson, I was pretty taken by his writing style from the first paragraph; there are certainly topics/themes within many of the stories in this collection to which I could readily relate and I definitely enjoyed the gritty, dark side of the subject matter. As a hospital employee with direct patient care experience, I definitely felt an emotional pull during the first story, "Nirvana," which explores the plight of a woman who has been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. She is concerned about what the end of her life will look like, as well as the continuation of the lives of those around her, which is certainly a common response to the loss of control that one experiences with a disease of this magnitude. As a girl of the 90s, I also loved the fact that her husband is bewildered by her recent fascination with Kurt Cobain; I'm not sure why I loved the words so much either, but I did.

Without a doubt, my favorite story was the second one, "Hurricane Anonymous," probably because I grew up in a small Texas town, close to the Gulf and the border of Louisiana, and am no stranger to the plight of those displaced by hurricanes nor the disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita which are the subject of this particular story. At times reminding me of Chris Gardner's tale in The Pursuit of Happyness, the main character is trying to maintain his job as a driver for UPS while caring for his young son whose mother has landed herself in the local jail; in addition, he is experiencing the kind of post-storm shock that lingers within the stories of local residents, the trash in their yards and the fact that no one has a place to call home.

I found that I was less interested in the final two stories; I feel that this may be due to the fact that this collection started with such a bang, for me. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend this one to those of you who appreciate the not-so-tidy details of illness, destruction and other emotionally-trying events; Johnson does a great job of highlighting the hope within the tough parts of life, which is the true treasure within this work.

Adam Johnson pushed boundaries here. Nudging what is socially acceptable. At his mildest form here in the small collection of stories in Fortune Smiles. And he rarely settles for mild in any of these stories.

This is not a feel good set of triumph over adversity set of tales. Johnson delves into what makes us all flawed creatures and in each of the stories focuses on some very unsettling truths about each main character. Don't get me wrong. There is adversity. Plenty of it. Triumph? Well that is for the reader to decide. And, perhaps like me, still ponder after reading this collection, if any real triumph is to be found.

Fear, anger, shame, delusion are all here in some way or form. As Johnson picks away at what makes us as a whole tick and pulls away the band-aids of dysfunction on his characters.

My favorite of the stories, and by that I mean the one that impacted me the most, was about a political prison in East Germany that juggles what someone does to protect themselves from the actions that establish power in the first place. Oddly the story about an addiction to child pornography was almost as affecting but in the opposite way. Creepy and discomforting it still delivered a strong emotional impact and examined the true aspects of sexual addiction (as opposed to just being too self-entitled to keep it in your pants Tiger Woods and Josh Duggar), as well as being self-aware to some extent of one's own deviancy. Chilling, sobering and again, it is written in a way that truly left me wondering why I kept reading. Which I think was at least part of the author's goal.

This is a strong collection that examines people in a way I found uniquely compelling.

I'm still digesting this collection of short stories. I selected it on a whim, not really sure what to expect. I did not read the stories in order, I don't feel they need to be read in any particular order. Although there are occasional, vague references to obscure items in other stories which may or may not be coincidental but do not in any way cause the stories to need to be read in a certain order.

I read dark meadow first, mostly to get it out of the way as I'm a parent and wasn't sure how much it would bother me. I was both intrigued and disturbed. Although the writing is slow and purposeful it keeps you on the edge waiting for a believed inevitability. Don't start this one if you won't be able to finish it before you put the book down. This is one of those stories that will stay with you. It was an emotional story to read, the main character can be simultaneously hated, pitied, and celebrated.

The story of the German prison warden started slow, as all of them did for me, but turned out to be very much worth the read. It was deep and thought provoking. Each story has its own way of bringing you into the minds of the characters and not just showing you their thought process but really bringing you into their lives and giving you the access and intimate details only a close friend or spouse would be privy to.

These stories are gritty and real. I disliked each until about halfway through then I couldn't stop reading and didn't want to let go of the characters. The title story of fortune smiles epitomized this feeling for me. I wanted more and could have read an entire book on the lives of those characters. This entire collection of stories was so out of the ordinary for me to read but I'm glad I read it. It's earned a long term spot on my shelf and I can't wait to happen upon it in a few years to read it again.

Just wanted to update this review quickly. It's been a couple weeks since I read these stories and they're still on my mind. I feel almost haunted by the story of the prison warden. I keep going over it in my head, especially the ending. It wrapped up in such a pure way but with incredible meaning and significance to the main character. The last sentence of this story, in and of itself, is nothing unusual but after the reading the story and seeing the words in context I keep thinking about them and all the ways they sum up the life of the man in the story.

This new collection of six short stories might as well have been called “Fortune Smirks” for the simple reason that it does. Adam Johnson’s characters are all tragic – a software engineer whose wife is suffering from Gillian-Barre syndrome, a former warden of an East Germany Stasi prison, a down-and-out man and his young son in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a woman staving off cancer, a pedophile, two North Korean defectors who feel displaced in the South.

It sounds like the recipe for a depressing read, but somehow, Adam Johnson colors between the lines to give his characters a sense of humanity and even (dare we say?) hope.

“Do you believe in second chances?” one character asks. “Can people change their nature?” The answer seems to be, “No BUT…” In my favorite of the stories, a man named Nonc finds himself saddled with a child he may (or may not) have fathered, named Geronimo, who is left in his van. Down and out in post-Katrina New Orleans, he strives to do the right thing. One carefully written line says it all: “…he kicks his leg out from under the sheet and leaves it exposed to lure mosquitoes away from his son.” The ambiguous ending leaves it unclear about whether he will be able to be the dad his father wasn’t…or not.

Similarly, in Nirvana, the first story, a digital programmer creates a virtual simulacrum of the assassinated president of the United States as he deals with his wife’s paralysis and growing depression. She is a Kurt Cobain fan; will his tech skills be able to give his wife a reason to live? In Dark Meadow, a pedophile, abused himself, uses his technical gifts to…what? As an officer asks, “Is this guy trying to protect kids by alerting the authorities of a way to catch predators? Or is he trying to help pedophiles by warning them of a vulnerability?”

In Adam Johnson’s stories, the endings aren’t wrapped up in a big bow. Like life itself, the characters are presented with a way forward; whether they eventually take it or not is up to them. That’s the beauty of this collection.

Fortune Smiles is a National Book Award winning collection of short stories by Adam Johnson. The quality of these stories suggest Johnson deserves the prize. He has a firm command of a very pliable yet believable short story “voice,” and has a considerable range within the voice. The stories are compelling and interesting.

A personal favorite for me, as I have often done this myself, is that he writes stories in English while depicting characters speaking other languages. So "Fortune Smiles", the last story, features Korean characters. Johnson knows enough about Korea to make the difference between the northern and southern Korean accent integral to the tale. He does this without submersing us in a story which feels overly exotic or ethnic. He is just telling a compelling story about people! There is a sense that we are them and they are us.

Johnson’s book //The Orphan Master’s Son// about North Korea, won a Puliitzer Prize and now I can’t wait to read it. This current book is a collection of stories; only one deals with the Koreas. In the tradition of Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates, Johnson is specific and horrific at the same time. While all of his stories are grounded in realistic settings and dialogue, the sum of the parts are exceptional. When a reader discovers a writer who is exceptional, the whole world seems to open up. Johnson currently teaches creative writing at Stanford and he is eminently qualified to do so. ||There are six stories in this collection and the reader will surely pause between them to catch his breath; they are breathtaking. ////Nirvana tells the story of a paralyzed woman and her techie husband who transcend their pain and confusion through technology. //Fortune Smiles// is set in post Katrina New Orleans. Its main character drives a delivery truck and tries to care for a young child who may or may not be his legitimate son. The reader asks if this man who is adrift can possibly care for this preverbal toddler. These stories and truly imaginative and well crafted.

I have been slowly making my way through Fortune Smiles, relishing each story like a delicious snack that is in short supply. There are few writers with this kind of emotional power in their writing. Each of the stories is finely crafted as if Johnson had followed the subjects around and listened in on their thoughts. They are painful and moving, with details about the human condition that are disturbing but beautifully etched. "George Orwell Was A Friend Of Mine" was particularly devastating, as everyone has had a time in their lives where they can relate to someone so lost in denial - not to the specific details, but to the desperate, feeble attempts to deny a crushing truth that may redefine a whole life. "George Orwell" was so powerful that, upon finishing it, I couldn't move on to the next story. It needed some time to fully absorb in my mind. This isn't easy or light reading, but it will enrich you.

To this English reader, Adam Johnson has the unmistakeable style of many of America’s finest literary novelists: at once assured and insouciant, wisps of humour deflecting from the horror of even the grimmest of stories. There are six of them here, each very different, each demanding – and receiving - the reader’s full involvement, all with the underlying theme of a character caring for and taking care of another. Any one of the six might have been extended to a full-length novel. Great book.

Other reviewers have discussed the stories so I will just say that Fortune Smiles is a powerhouse collection of stories. You do have to be in a certain mood or frame of mind to read and appreciate them, and the stories here are the kinds that you find yourself going back to re-read in order to catch the layers or complexities that you didn't on the first read. A very satisfying read for the thinking reader - there's so much to consider with each story.

I had not read Adam Johnson before but after reading Fortune Smiles I am eager to start The Orphan Master's Son.

There are 6 stories in this book, all published previously from this Pulitzer Prize winning author.
All of them certainly draw you in quickly. The problem with these stories as with many is that one feels sometimes like you are left hanging that there is more to tell, but the storyline stops.

The characters in his stories seemed destined for problems. The storylines are not one of joyful times, but instead illness, child pornography, ill-fated pasts and defectors. There seems to be little optimism in the plots. They are gloomy but yet give a semblance of life as it is. Fans of short stories will probably find this collection interesting.

In Fortune Smiles, Adam Johnson displays his writing talents by giving a voice to unique people in uncommon circumstances. Johnson's talents shine in each tale, though the stories themselves may provide food for thought, they are rather grim. I enjoyed this story collection and was not disappointed, but I was challenged in reading several of them.

There is an ease of reading quality to Johnson's writing though his talents are of a high caliber-witty, stark, humorous and revealing-all qualities that are needed to create good short stories, but it seems to me each story in this selection could be its own book.

I enjoy short story collections as a way to sample an author's range without the onus of making a commitment to a full-length book. With the most memorable collections, I pick up the book, intending to read just one story, and find that story so potent that, reeling slightly, I continue to the next, and another, and another. Work remains unfinished, the kids go to bed without brushing their teeth, the messages are accumulating on the phone, no matter. I must get another fix, until the book ends and I am forced to snap back to my much more mundane real world.

Fortune Smiles is not that collection. I experienced it one story at a time, with long intervals between stories as I recovered from one and steeled myself for the next. They differ in characters, settings, and situations. Nirvana is set in Palo Alto and has local (for me) references, which I liked, but otherwise seemed to be a compilation of intriguing elements that did not quite come together. Maybe it simply isn't possible to mix drones, dead presidents, Kurt Cobain, and a paralyzing disease into one story and make it work. Dark Meadow, criss-crossed by Los Angeles freeways, relies on the nexus of technology and child pornography. If the author was trying to make me uncomfortable, he was successful, but if I weren't required to review the book, I might have banished it to the box in the garage at that point.

Interesting Facts was the first story to grab me: disturbing, lyrical, haunting, evocative, both funny and poignant. I didn't know if it was Adam or me, but I continued, full of hope, to Hurricanes Anonymous, which starts with promise and fizzles out. George Orwell was simply obnoxious and brought no new perspectives to a well-traversed story line. Fortune Smiles concludes the collection with a change-of-pace depiction of two North Korean refugees. Though it did not affect me as much as Interesting Facts did, it was well conceived and executed.

I have an advance review copy, no pretty cover, and it's over 300 pages long. Six stories, you're averaging 50 pages each. It's an awkward length, heading toward novella territory, and most of the stories could have had a chunk edited out and been the better for that. As it was, the endings were sometimes problematic, possibly because the author felt as though he needed to wrap them up but fumbled on the finish line.

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Fortune Smiles is an astounding collection of short stories. They are dark and brilliant, well written and profound. Adam Johnson is a master of his craft and there is really nothing more to add than to agree with what every other reviewer has already stated - this is an important book and a must read for any fan of literary fiction. I am not a fan of short stories, but these are a different experience in that they possess all the complexity of a full length novel. String them all together and you get a valuable reading experience that you won't soon forget.

After reading the six short stories in the collection by Adam Johnson titled, Fortune Smiles, I gained a deeper understanding of why this fine writer has won so many awards. With finely written prose, using great efficiency, Johnson develops characters fully and places them in situations of conflict or change that allows readers to gain insight into our human condition. Readers who appreciate finely written prose, especially those who like short stories, will find superb writing in this collection.

Rating: Five-star (I love it)

How does one follow up a Pulitzer-prize winning novel that shook the literary world? With a collection of stories so crazy good it should cause the same kind of quake. Anyone who knows Johnson's work will again be impressed by his elegant and graceful writing. Every page has sentences worth framing. And many will rightly applaud his ingenious plotting and signature wrecked characters, so desperately in search of clinging to (or re-acquiring) their humanity. (You won't meet a character this year who lands on you like Mr. Roses. Believe me.) But what I was most blown away by here was the author's utterly courageous grappling with impossible subjects. Who tries to make a pedophile a main character? Who writes a cancer story like this one? Who adopts the nostalgic voice of an East German prison warden? Johnson does. He's writing without a net, and the result is fiction that made me forget I was reading, that made me feel emotions I can't name but know I want to feel again.

Masterful writing with each story from a different place and different characters. The stories are unnerving and the characters are hard to forget. All are deeply flawed but incredibly human. This collection was hard to put down with each one becoming my new favorite. I recommend this book to anyone who appreciates an absorbing story and wonderful, complex, flawed characters.

I loved most of the stories. The breast cancer survivor, the pedophile, the North Koreans. Just gorgeous writing. I do have a question about anachronism in the story of the East Berlin Stasi. Does it realy mention facebook? If the author reads reviews, could he please clarify this for me in a comment? Anyway, this is a very important book that opened doors into worlds I didn't know! Mr. Johnson, you deserve any award you get!

In the literary world, stories are supposed to do more than merely entertain. They are supposed to reflect the world and the human condition in ways that enlighten, inform, and spur new ways of thinking. Sometimes, however, stories that are labeled or promoted as literary are so pretentiously written that their intent is at best nebulous and at worst utterly inscrutable. In author Adam Johnson's short-story collection FORTUNE SMILES--published on the heels of his Pulitzer-winning novel, THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON--we find a mixed bag containing stories of both types. That is, a couple of the six stories in the collection are true literary pieces that offer poignant points, moving maxims, and droll dicta, whereas a couple fall short and leave the reader wondering what the heck Johnson is trying to say. And the remainders fall somewhere in between.

Only two stories in FORTUNE SMILES are works of genuine literary merit. The better of the two, "Interesting Facts," is about a breast-cancer victim who reflects back on her life and laments the fact that she didn't spend more time focusing on the important things, and she also worries that her actions (or lack thereof) may make it difficult for her children to truly remember her. In addition to offering an emotionally stirring glimpse into the mind of a modern American career woman, the story challenges readers to consider the worth of immaterial things like a success, status, and family relationships and weigh those things against each other. And the book's other notable piece, the eponymous "Fortune Smiles," centers around two North Koreans who are finding it difficult to adjust after defecting to South Korea. Though not quite as poignant or socially relevant as the breast-cancer story, this one still packs a pretty good sociopolitical punch by suggesting that some of the world's denizens, even some who have suffered greatly under totalitarian regimes, do not necessarily find the West's concepts of freedom and happiness to be the ultimate ideals.

Two more stories in the book are good reads, but they don't quite make it to the literary level of the aforementioned. Sharing similar themes about the dangers of digital technology, both stories ultimately fall short because the delivery of their "messages" is a bit heavy handed. Set in what is clearly meant to be the not-too-distant future, "Nirvana" is about a computer engineer whose wife is the victim of an accident that has left her a quadriplegic. He at first finds solace by constructing a holographic recreation of the recently assassinated President of the United States--the "brain" of the hologram is created on the fly by tapping into the internet's seemingly inexhaustible information about the Pres--and using it as a sort of personal therapist. In the end, he gives his wife the same sort of escape by creating a holographic version of Kurt Cobain, frontman for the twentieth-century rock band Nirvana and his wife's favorite musician. The suggestion here is, of course, that today's members of society may be relying too much on fallible digital information, specifically that from the internet, to construct their views of the corporeal world. And in "Dark Meadow," a pedophile who is also a computer tech struggles to overcome his own physical urges as he sabotages other pedophiles in their attempt to use cyberspace as their hunting ground. Needless to say, this story warns about the nefarious uses to which technology can be put to use--and not just by perverts and criminals, either, as the story also contains a not-so-subtle suggestion that all governments are Orwellian to one degree or another and use technology to keep tabs on their citizens.

As for the book's two remaining stories, both have surface elements that make them seem as if they have something deep to say, but upon close examination and consideration, it's difficult, if not impossible, to determine exactly what points the stories are trying to make. In the more pretentious of the two, "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," the former warden of an East German prison, living in what is now a reunified Germany, confronts one of the prison's former inmates and attempts to publicly refute her claims about the atrocities she suffered under the warden's administration. Granted, the story features compelling character studies, but which character represents the historical "facts" here--the former jailer, or his onetime captive? Or does the "truth" fall somewhere in between? The story never makes this clear, and the literary waters are further muddied when the story ends and neither of the characters seems to have experienced any significant spiritual growth or cognitive transformation.

The other story, "Hurricanes Anonymous," is equally baffling. Set in southern Louisiana in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the story follows a UPS delivery man as he tries to slowly rebuild a life for himself and his infant son. The character incessantly vacillates between narcissism and responsibility, however, and when the narrative ends with the guy agreeing to help his girlfriend build a business and establish roots and a family, it's impossible to determine if he really means it, especially since he has also just delivered his son into the care of a near stranger. So, did the character grow during the story? Did he (and therefore the reader) learn anything new or useful about life or humanity? Does the story meet the criteria for literary merit? To the first two questions, and thus to the third, the only possible answer is no.

FORTUNE SMILES is a capable, if flawed, work of art. Out of a total of six stories, two are literary masterworks and two are quite weak. The other two, however, are competent enough that they help offset the weak and raise the literary merit of the book overall. And Johnson's strong prose doesn't hurt, of course. The author definitely knows how to turn a phrase and construct stylistic paragraphs, and he has a command of grammar, usage, and sentence mechanics--a few comma splices here and there notwithstanding--that should satisfy even the most stringent of grammarians. So all in all, FORTUNE SMILES is a good read, and it will make a nice addition to the libraries of both casual readers and the literati alike.

One of the best short story collections out there. Adam Johnson is a true pleasure to read. It is no surprise that the collection is on the longlist for the 2015 National Book Awards. I read his tour de force The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles delivers the same punch. The stories are wildly entertaining, heartfelt, and memorable. The six stories sinuously transports the reader through indelible settings like New Orleans after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Hohenschönhausen prison eighteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Silicon Valley in a Black Mirror-esque future that is complete with a digital simulacrum of Kurt Cobain, and, in the title story, a return to Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning subject of North Korea.

The writing in the stories of FORTUNE SMILES is excellent as each story is expertly plotted, characterized and executed. However for what ever reason none of the stories really stood out for me as a favorite that I can say I just loved and my personal reaction to them in recommending them to others is just average. So I am giving FORTUNE SMILES four stars - five for how well Johnson crafted each tale and three for my personal reaction to them.

Adam Johnson writes stories that destroy you with their exactness. No detail is misplaced in his rigorous worlds. Nowhere is this clearer than in the masterpiece of "Fortune Smiles," "Dark Meadow." It would have been enough to go into the mind of a tormented viewer of child pornography, as Johnson does here, but to master the lingo and details of the world gives it an eerie reality that surpasses much recent fiction. It is also--and this is the odd thing about the story--devastating and touching. Johnson's stories, which used to be about achieving a brilliant speed and escape velocity (I'm thinking of classics like "Trauma Plate" and "The History of Cancer" from "Emporium"), have moved inward, become darker, circling bedrooms ("Nirvana," "Interesting Facts") and busted-up lives (the falling-apart UPS driver of the post-Katrina "Hurricanes Anonymous"). He has become a great chronicler of a sort of American destruction.

Adam Johnson takes you on phenomenal journey through those topics, people, and situations that most people know exist, but at the same time they typically do not speak about, at least from a raw emotional standpoint. Fasten your seat belt. With each story you are taken into a world where you will actually experience a flood of emotions head on as each carefully chosen word unfolds the story, the mark of a brilliant writer. Johnson does not candy-coat anything – he lays it all right out there.

Without question, my favorite is “Dark Meadows”, which takes us inside the mind of a former child predator. I must tell you I was literally on the edge of my couch cushion while reading this selection, and could not put the book down until I had finished the story to see where it was going to go next.

Upon completion of the collection I had that vague sense of “Post Book Depression”, that feeling you get when you don’t want the read to be over, and days later are still contemplating in your mind. As always, Johnson leaves the reader wanting more. FORTUNE SMILES is a definite must read book.