Fortune Smiles

Resumen del libro

Subtly surreal, darkly comic, both hilarious and heartbreaking,Fortune Smiles is a major collection of stories that gives voice to the perspectives we don't often hear, while offering something rare in fiction: a new way of looking at the 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. Nirvana, which won the prestigiousSunday 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 theBest American Short Stories anthology 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.

Biografía del autor

Adam Johnson, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for Fiction 2015 for his collection of stories "Fortune Smiles"had an ideal upbringing for a writer. His father was a night watchman at the Phoenix Zoo and he would bring young Adam along on his evening rounds.<br><br> My father showed me there was a zoo that average people saw, but at night, with all the keys in hand, he would lift the veil and show me the real zoo, he said. Animals had certain behaviors in their exhibits, I learned, but at night, in their private enclosures, they displayed their true personalities. The zoo taught me there was always a hidden, purer world, and this is the only part of life I'm interested in depicting in my work.