Adam Johnson5.0 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY USA TODAY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Marie Claire • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • BuzzFeed • Los Angeles Magazine • The Independent • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed novel about North Korea, "The Orphan Master’s Son", Adam Johnson is one of America’s most provocative and powerful authors. Critics have compared him to Kurt Vonnegut, David Mitchell, and George Saunders, but Johnson’s new book will only further his reputation as one of our most original writers. 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 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. “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.
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.
Charles Baxter0.0 From one of the great masters of the contemporary short story, here is an astonishing collection that showcases Charles Baxter’s unique ability to unveil the remarkable in the seemingly inconsequential moments of an eerie yet familiar life.
Penetrating and prophetic, the ten inter-related stories in "There’s Something I Want You to Do" are held together by a surreally intricate web of cause and effect—one that slowly ensnares both fictional bystanders and enraptured readers. Benny, an architect and hopeless romantic, is robbed on his daily walk along the Mississippi River, and the blow of a baseball bat to the back of his knee feels like a strike from God. A drug dealer named Black Bird reads Othello while waiting for customers in a bar. Elijah, a pediatrician and the father of two, is visited nightly by visions of Alfred Hitchcock. Meanwhile, a dog won’t stop barking, a passenger on a transatlantic flight reads aloud from the book of Psalms during turbulence, and a scream carries itself through the early-morning Minneapolis air.
As the collection progresses, we delve more deeply into the private lives of these characters, exploring their fears, fantasies, and obsessions. They appear and reappear, performing praiseworthy and loathsome acts in equal measure in response to the request—or demand—lodged in each story’s center. The result is a portrait of human nature as seen from the tightrope that spans the distance between dreams and waking life—a portrait that could have arisen only from Baxter’s singular vision. Readers will be stunned by his uncanny understanding of human attraction and left to puzzle over the meaning of virtue and the unpredictable and mysterious ways in which we behave.
Колум Маккэнн3.8 Colum McCann's collection of a novella and three short stories captures an extraordinary cast of characters, each at a turning point. In the title novella, a prominent retired judge in his eighties casts his net into a sea of memories over the course of a morning, as his thoughts are interrupted by updates from a police investigation into his murder that will take place later that afternoon. In "Sh'khol," a woman gives her son, who is deaf and troubled, a wet suit so he can swim in the cold waters off the Irish coast where they live--until he disappears one day along with a wet suit. "Treaty" brings us into the life of a nun, haunted by a past trauma, who later comes face-to-face with a man she believes may be the one who attacked her. And "What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?" shows a writer trying to frame the story of a young Marine calling home from a remote Afghan outpost at midnight on New Year's Eve. While their circumstances vary, the characters that inhabit the pages of this collection are united in their search for meaning as their humanity is tested. This collection is a tribute to that search, and ultimately a celebration of the power of the stories we tell, both to ourselves and to others.
Эдриан Томинэ4.0 «Смех и смерть» — настоящая демонстрация возможностей комикса, как вида искусства, и ироничное исследование утраты, творческих амбиций, самоидентификации и отношений в семье. Этим сборником Эдриан Томинэ подтверждает, что является не только одним из важнейших авторов современного комикса, но и одним из величайших голосов актуальной американской литературы. Томинэ — мастер маленького жеста, способный передать эмоцию еле заметным изменением в кадре или через размашистые, полноцветные пейзажи. В сборник вошло шесть историй о разрушительных последствиях внешнего сходства в постоянно находящемся онлайн современном мире, о рождении и гибели новой важной формы искусства, о родительстве, моральных ориентирах и стендапе. Все вместе они создают очень эмоциональную зарисовку нынешнего мира.