Perhaps this is to say that the stories in Fortune Smiles may be best appreciated when taken out into the sunshine one by one. Among authorial sins, defensiveness feels minor, but when one is being asked to be moved by a story, when the story is so clearly the most heartfelt one in the book, anything distancing that has been inserted in the space between the author and the reader does matter. Johnson is currently a professor in creative writing at Stanford. When comedy is applied to tragedy over and over, it can start to take on an element of defensiveness cumulatively, it can feel as if Johnson is holding the reader at arm’s length by how cheery his darkness can be. His book of short stories, Fortune Smiles, won The National Book Award for Fiction in 2015. An advance reading copy, preceding the first edition, of this collection of short stories. Each of these stories plants a small bomb in the reader’s head life after reading Fortune Smiles is a series of small explosions in which the reader - perhaps unwillingly - recognizes Adam Johnson’s gleefully bleak world in her own. But the end is near, and lately we have taken to bringing the VCR with us to the shop, where we sit. Weve tried all the gimmicks: two-for-one rentals, the VIP card, a night drop.

Despairing men are at the heart of each of these tales, most of them protagonists on the cusp of being antagonists. T he Body Armor Emporium opened down the street a few months back, and I tell you, its killing mom-and-pop bullet-proof vest rental shops like ours.

As with The Orphan Master’s Son, there’s a great deal of comedy to be found in Fortune Smiles, though the humor in this new book is offset by a darkness so pervasive I found it seeping into my daily life.

Adam johnson short stories