| Title | : | Emporium |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0142001953 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780142001950 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2002 |
| Awards | : | New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award (2003) |
Emporium Reviews
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Man, can Adam Johnson write. (I have not yet read The Orphan Master's Son, for which he won the Pulitzer, though I plan to.) In the stories of this book, Johnson creates worlds that are off kilter, some downright bizarre, and his prose zings, barely containable on the page. Johnson's creative gifts are on full display, which at times I will admit, I was resistant to. I found myself wary of the anti-realism, not that he doesn't do it beautifully.
Having been thoroughly wowed by his writing, I will also say that I wasn't much moved by this book. Most of the stories have a heavy male vibe to them, not that there's anything wrong with that, but maybe on an emotional level, I felt a distance. There is a strong father/son theme throughout. The three stories I found the most fulfilling: The Jughead of Berlin (the one female protagonist),Your Own Backyard, and the final story The Eighth Sea.
Definitely recommended. -
Johnson seeks connection with this one or his characters do. And in three of the stories I felt this connection as a reader too. My three favourites, Teen Sniper, Your Own Backyard and The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite drove the point for me. The others maybe less so but still flashes from those stories keep flashing in my mind from time to time.
Like with any other connections stories sometimes create a strong thread, other times the thread is more fragile or even gets lost. Johnsons gives different scenarios, some of them quite sci fi and uses them to explore how the outside environment presses on our needs, our connection to others which we need to be. So we end up fighting the outside which keeps us from the connection we need.
My favourite stories get 5 stars the other 3 stars - so I'm averaging out at 4 stars.
Read with Maya
Teen Sniper - This is an Ode to the Gun - maybe a sarcastic one, at least I sure hope so. Johnson shows how easy it is for priorities to become askew and so human connection too becomes askewed.
Your Own Backyard Wolf - wild, hurt or just bad?
The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite it's sad and funny, and hopeful and not and angry and smiling - it's alive. Funny how we end up living only when we get the date of our death. -
Adam Johnson's debut short story collection shows tantalizing potential. Johnson is a talented writer, and the prose on display here is strong. There is also great creativity in these stories, which feature teenage sniper experts, busloads of hard-partying cancer patients, a top-secret Canadian space program, and much more. My favorite entries (Teen Sniper and the Canadanaut) also feature sneaky-funny humor reminiscent of George Saunders; indeed, these stories are so similar to some of Saunders' work that it seems likely that he was a major influence on Johnson.
However, as much promise as this collection shows, Johnson is still a developing talent at this point. Most of these stories intrigue, but don't quite come together in a satisfying or fulfilling way. They tend to feel like pieces put together by a very talented MFA student still finding himself as a writer, which is probably what some of these stories more or less are.
Overall, this is an interesting collection that Johnson's fans may enjoy, but his best was definitely yet to come. 3.5 stars. -
Having read three of his books this year I can say that Adam Johnson is my favorite contemporary author. His stories are never conventional, sometimes venturing deep into the weird where the resulting reaction could vary from laughter to strong dislike. But what I come back to his stories for is the compassion and kindness to his characters and their troubles which are always present in his voice.
Emporium for me was not as great as Johnson’s later collection of short stories, Fortune Smiles, but it was still very good. The prevailing themes here were the pains of growing into adulthood and the relationship (or the lack of it) between a parent and their child so most stories left me feeling melancholic. However, I didn’t really connect with couple of the stories.
Favorite in the collection: Teen Sniper. I also loved Your Own Backyard, and The Eight Sea.
Read with Sofia, Nov 2016.
3.5 stars -
The characters in Emporium, Adam Johnson's first book of stories, have a "newer, more optimistic vocabulary for violence." This is what Lt. Kim tells Tim, the teen police sniper, he will achieve through positive visualization during his kills in the lead story "Teen Sniper."
Tim and most of the other absurd, almost nightmare humans that people Johnson's collection could be hard-partying nephews of Crash author J.G. Ballard's more claustrophobic visions of the human race. Or, considering that most of these stories are dark satires, maybe more like distant cousins of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club members. They've gone so far past the apocalypse that in "Trauma Plate" nostalgia is reserved for mom-and-pop bulletproof-vest rental shops competing with the Body Armor Emporium down the road.
Like Ballard and Palahniuk, Johnson attempts to portray the new mythologies seeping up from the concrete in these heady days of unrestrained violence and capitalism. What is the new iconography that speaks to the deep part of our souls, souls that might not ever wander into forests until teen years but watch bloody dismemberment almost daily, and whose group communions most often take place at the "emporium," aka the mall?
But while Ballard's characters are more likely to be found crouching behind a burnt-out fuselage cradling a rifle and hallucinating, Johnson's are still fairly grounded in a world most of us would recognize, albeit secondhand. Take, for example, "The Jughead of Berlin," his tale about a girl taking a last joy ride with her dad before the feds raids their home for illegal gambling equipment. To complicate matters, the girl is in love with an ROTC boy who will be along on the raid. Or "The History of Cancer," the story of the preteen narrator and his buddy Ralph, who spend their days sorting the colored tiles that Ralph's dad pilfers from work. The first time the narrator meets Ralph's mom "she hooked a thumb behind the elastic band of her velour shorts and pulled them down to the stubble of her pubic hair so she could show me her still-fresh hysterectomy scar. This was to demonstrate why I was to stay quiet in her house, make my own sandwiches, and not slam that damn ball against the carport."
That said, Johnson displays the Ballard-like tendency to find just as much poetry in carnage and technology as in nature. Consider these lines from an ex-cop in "Your Own Backyard": "On Traffic [duty], you'll see pelvic wings unfold against steering columns. There'll be breast plates you can see light through, dentures imbedded in dashboards." "Your Own Backyard" is the most chilling of the stories: Its protagonist, an ex-cop who now culls animals for a zoo, seems to have already lost his 5-year-old son to cold-blooded sociopathy. When a wolf (a lot of wolves, rifles, and planes appear in these stories) sprays the son, you're not sure if the wolf is accepting the son as one of its own or putting him in his place.
The dad in "Your Own Backyard" is one of about a half-dozen ineffectual pater familias that populate these pages. Along with all the restrained-wolf imagery and technology gone haywire, there is a strong undercurrent of hairy male juju. The teen in "The Cliff Gods of Acapulco" learns about African gods that take human form and sleep with women, then change back, leaving a son who is "a semigod, with small powers he doesn't understand, and like his father, he's a roamer, with one wing in heaven, one foot on earth, doomed to wander toward every distant mud city that appears golden in his half-divine sight." "His real father might be a bird or a storm, sea-beast or lion," another character muses, "so this typical young man . . . must learn to find his fathers where he can."
It is in the stories where Johnson balances the human comedy against the crush of technology, however, that his voice is most his own, as in "Teen Sniper," the collection's gem. The title character is a prodigy at sniping--"won the Disney Classic at age eleven." His best friend is a bomb-sniffing robot for whose birthday the sniper buys a programming update--"Negotiator 5.0, with the latest Black English Converters--because ROMS wants to express himself." The one problem the talented teen has is that he can't help having empathy for his marks.
And human empathy offers a note of hope in the collection's final story. The young protagonist of "The Eighth Sea," who has been sentenced to "Adult Redirection" meetings after a drunk-and-disorderly arrest, reports to a job site to repair a backyard wall smashed by a horrific car accident. Seeing groceries and condoms scattered in the detritus, he can't help but imagine the small world ended by this unforeseen event. Perhaps simple human concern is one of the few constants in a world of ever-mutating dystopia; as long as people can look outside themselves and consider the plight of others, there is a chance of triggers not pulled, bombs not launched, and plagues not spread.
-
I had a wonderful literary experience attending the
Orcas Island Lit Festival last weekend. Adam Johnson was one of the talented authors I had a chance to hear interviewed. I have read
The Orphan Master's Son and
Fortune Smiles, so I purchased Emporium for the signing and to read and enjoy his early work. One of the best features of the collection was the variety which kept my interest and showed the range of writing ability Johnson has to offer. At the festival, he told a story of his early life going to the zoo with his father who had a night job there. One of the stories in the book told this story in a different way and it was my favorite of the collection. The voice of Johnson’s storytelling ability came through loud and clear! -
Pretty strong collected by Adam Johnson here. Emporium would be an enjoyable read for anyone. Off the top of my head, it's hard not to be moved by "Trauma Plate," "Teen Sniper" (the opening story), or "The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite." Most (but not all?) of these stories are set in a near-future where the world gets a little less inhumane as a response to awful things that occur in the world. People turn to drastic measures once the world feels less accommodating. For example, "Teen Sniper" is the story of a future where teenage mercenaries are hired to snipe people in hostage situations when there's no other option for negotiation. And in "Trauma Plate," crime has gotten so bad that people take to wearing bulletproof vests to protect themselves. This is the story, told from three perspectives, about a family who owns a mom-and-pop bulletproof vest store and how they're coping with the extreme violence. Good, amazingly written collection.
-
Read the last paragraph of each story and you will get the pithy message all wrapped up. Many of these simply don’t feel like fully completed stories. “Teen Sniper” is about a teen sniper. “In Your Own Backyard” is probably my favorite story of the bunch as a former cop, current night patrolman at the zoo, tries to do what it takes to reign in his unruly son. Unlike Johnson’s brilliant Fortune Smiles collection, I don’t see a single story I will revisit or remember much a few months down the line. To see Johnson’s true ability, check out “Dark Meadow” dark as can be but truly original and brilliant writing.
C -
There are four seamless and wildly inventive tales that illustrate excellent story-telling. This book is also a wonderful classroom text for College Reading Development. Students have consistently responded positively to reading those four stories, and many in-depth and thought provoking class discussions have been spurred by: "Teen Sniper," "Your Own Backyard," "Trauma Plate" and "The Jughead of Berlin." Highly recommended read for studying and appreciating the craft of fiction and to spark reading interest in basic skills curriculum.
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This book struck me as a bad impression of the contemporary Ironic Male Short Story Writer. Even the diction seemed loosely formed and without a certain urgency I look for in short stories.
-
Good collection of stories that suffer from running a little long and trying to do a little much, heap on just a few too many details and tricks and twists so that things feel a bit too busy. Venture often into that George Saunders-esque wacky-near-future sort of territory but do so competently (reminiscent of what I've read of Jim Shepherd, too). Feel a bit off the mark (ha?) or overdone in stories like "Teen Sniper" but get more effectively to the heart (again, ha?) in those such as "Trauma Plate." Other highlights: A high-school graduate tries to find his way into really living life while chauffeuring cancer patients on a night out in "The Death-dealing Cassini Satellite"; a man unravels his relationship with his father and step-father while recalling summer shenanigans involving a caiman and a wind tunnel years ago with a friend in "Cliff Gods of Acapulco"; a Louisiana girl experiences her first taste of love and want ahead of an ATF raid on her smuggler father in "The Jughead of Berlin"; the Canadians shoot for the moon in the wild "Canadanaut" and a young man first experiences life's complications alongside a married woman at court-ordered counseling for alcoholism, his brick-laying father, and the Power Team in "The Eighth Sea," the closer and probably strongest piece in the collection.
-
A collection of amusing but unsatisfying stories by the great Adam Johnson, written while he was trying to discipline his voice and work through his obsessions. As a young writer, he could compose some of the funniest sentences in the history of the English language (I can't quote it without getting kicked off Goodreads, but the scene from "Cananaut" in which a military hooker exposes her private parts to the Arctic cold had me cackling loud enough to wake the neighbor's sleeping infant), but strung them together into sloppy, overlong stories that end about five pages before closing line. He was also fascinated with father-son relationships, Arizona, aimless boys in their late teens, and cars, which reappear time and again in the "Emporium" collection and make it a bit monochromatic. But the author is obviously gifted enough to achieve brilliance if he hones his talents into skills. And over time, he did.
-
The writing is strong and imaginative, but never drew me in. I felt distanced, and my rating reflects that. Many of the stories also suffer from the "undisclosed first person narrator syndrome" whereby we are given little information. The first story I read in this collection was The Canadanaut, which was an unfortunate introduction, since I am Canadian. (Is this narrator male? Female? Who knows?) While witty it perhaps would be wittier to someone who was less familiar with Canada. For example, I expected the french Canadian character would be revealed as someone who was only pretending to be french, because his french was so cartoonish. Turns out much of the collection was cartoonish is a satirical kind of way. Beautiful amazing writing, as I say, but failed to draw me in.
-
This collection is a bit entertaining however the stories were slow and quite unsatisfying. I felt very distanced from the characters, I was never drawn in and couldn't properly imagine or feel the situations. The stories were also pointless and incomplete, the writer tried to add some twists and details but they just weren't interesting. Out of the whole collection maybe two or three stories were actually nice but again, not satisfying at all.
Never read any novel for this author but the collection sucks. -
Johnson is one talented writerI have read his later works fit SR but in this relatively short collection of stories you see the talent. Set in a vaguely twisted future this collection written 15 years pre The Parkland massacre shows where we might be headed. Great sentences and great tales. There may be better writers than Johnson but let me know because I want to read them
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I found this collection slow and self-regarding. Other people might love them, but the stories seemed inconclusive and a bit pointless. Perhaps that is indicative of the lives of the characters/society, but it seemed like classic MFA in creative writing style and the twists felt gimmicky.
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More Saunders-esce then I had expected based on his other collection and novels.
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I love Johnson's other work but this collection was majorly underwhelming.
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AMAZING!
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Hit ot miss for me. My favorite was THE DEATH DEALING CASSINI SATELLITE. But that was when the sci-fi took a step back to make way for a particular setting instead
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As many readers will already know from The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is a Wizard. Period. He may write the sharpest, most magical sentences of any American writing today. He creates mad, quasi-futuristic dystopias and renders them plausibly, in detail. He seems an omnivorous sponge as well as an indefatigable researcher: no one could carry as much arcane knowledge - erecting and mortaring in a wall, police sniping MO, the technology of Kevlar vests, culling the collection at the local zoo, airplane pilot checkout and flight routines, and much more - swirling around in his head. Strange, widely varied stories but with many common threads - loneliness, an essential humanity, surreal implausible premises made plausible, guns, either used or hanging on a Chekov wall, orange peels and their very light weight when dried - all good. And then Johnson develops his tales, luring a reader in often through sheer strangenesss. (The sublime often has an element of strangeness about it, doesn't it?)
One consistency that comes through loud and clear in a story collection but would imperceptible had you read each of these over a period of years in various literary periodicals is that the narrator of every story has essentially the same voice, Johnson's own elegant, observant one, be that narrator a horny teenager, a grounded pilot, a sniper, a physicist, a bricklayer, an office clerk, whatever. Is this a flaw? I compare Johnson to, say, literary shapeshifter David Mitchell, who gives unique voices, phrasing, idiosyncrasies to his unusual characters. But this is Johnson's first collection, and his own voice - uniquely powerful, uncommonly inventive, dryly funny, humor that pops up, almost invariably by surpise, in odd places and circumstances, a sad yet tenderly resigned sensibility - is captivating. Moreover, all but one of these stories resists closure: think of a typical New Yorker story, whose conventional critics - particularly in the 1970s-1980s - made the complaint that they read as through the concluding paragraph had been struck out. But Johnson never panders. He challenges his readers to think, as would a strong contemporary poet. The last paragraph may be for the reader to write.
Add that's how Johnson's story structure and style work for me: very like poetry, and not only because his sentences are poetically beautiful. The stories make me pause throughout, and then at their conclusion, to think, relatively hard, with pages flipped back to and reread, about what I just experienced. This is apart from an odd sense of dislocation, but in a place with many familiar elements and motives. I could not go from one story directly to the next. I read the book over a period of some two weeks and found, for the most part, each story to be vaguely unsettling, and something I had to ponder, to satisfying, rewarding effect (There is one exception, "The Canadanaut," the only tale that comes to a conventional close and that is only unsettling until you grasp Johnson's project. Readers with a youthful addiction to Tom Swift, Jr. books will understand.)
In any event, I'm most definitely a fan and believe, very emphatically, that Adam Johnson is a great voice in American fiction who should be read by anyone who loves great, imaginative writing. -
I have read a number of these stories more than once, but I clearly need to read them yet again since some of the reviews here that I enjoyed came from people who enjoyed stories which I thought less of than the following: "Teen Sniper", really good, “The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite" amazing (though my opinion may have been swayed in part because of my family's personal experience with the subject matter of the story). I think that my favorite, however, may well have been "Trauma Plate". Did an upbringing in New York affect my outlook on a story such as this?
By the way, I found the hardcover edition of this on the bargain shelves at Barnes and Noble for about $4.00! (At the same time, they were selling the paperback for more than triple that price, if I remember correctly! Score!)
I knew nothing of Johnson or his work when I found this, but Michiko Kakutani offered the highest praise, and she is known to be brutal at times. Result: I discovered a great book and a great writer. -
Though at first glance the nine stories of Emporium, a collection by Adam Johnson, seem to be as different from each other as a zoo full of animals in Phoenix is from a satellite base in who-knows-where Canada, the same thread winds throughout each one. I can’t quite place my finger on it, but it has something to do with this line from my favorite story of the entire collection, "Cliff Gods of Acapulco": “There’s the boxy loop of youth, a decade that leaves your ears ringing with television and loneliness.” In almost every story, the humming center of the plot revolves around youth. Even in the one story that doesn't center around young people, "The Canadanaut", there is a chain of command that suggests authority and father figures and such. What’s more, most of the intriguing clashes occur between youth and the parents who are irresponsible enough that they probably never should have had them in the first place. And although the characters get shot to the moon, lose toes, sell body armor for a living, and tear phonebooks apart with the Power Team (Ha! The Power Team! Anyone remember those guys? Anyone?), one question is examined over and over again: how are young people supposed to connect with anybody when their parents can’t even connect with them? A vast mine to quarry, to be sure. But when Adam Johnson is at his best, he shows us how dysfunction is as easy to inherit as brown eyes or baldness.
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Actual rating: 2.5 stars.
OK, to say that I was ambivalent about this collection is a bit of an understatement. Like with any typical short story collection, you start seeing some of the same things pop up each time. With Johnson, it's zany yet oddly flat characters and ridiculously detailed arrays of weaponry/high tech for some reason. With certain stories, I couldn't help but think this collection is just the perfect example of an author writing for people who think like him, all in this hipster little niche of "oh, look how clever we are."
Which is a shame, because with one of my favorite stories here, "Teen Sniper", the collection showed some promise. But, honestly, none of the other stories quite rivaled it. A couple, "The Canadanaut" and "The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite" , came close, but that was about it.
I feel like Johnson tended to stick to the same template for his main characters, most of them guys. The one time he did write from a female narrator's point of view was pretty abysmal, in my opinion, if not outright cringeworthy.
So...it's great for one story and then...eh. -
A bold collection of slightly-longer-than-ordinary short stories, Adam Johnson's particular style encapsulates worlds gone mad with violence, and the casual indifference of the people who live within them. His stories are at their best when they're being their most topical--"Trauma Plate" could be read as an out-and-out criticism of American gun culture--but even when a story is just about its own plot, Johnson's prose is still thick with enjoyable nostalgia. Where the collection's weakness lies is in its characters; most of the stories are about the troubles of white men, but their complaints are made tolerable by the genuinely despicable worlds in which they live. Johnson does occasionally break his mold, too; several stories are from the point of view of young girls, and "The Canadanaut" benefits from an eccentric cast that both revel in and defy Canadian stereotypes. A fantastic collection of dense prose by a very talented writer.
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Reading this excellent short-story collection--the second I’ve read by Adam Johnson (after the later, and amazing, Fortune Smiles)--has confirmed my ardent fandom, at least with respect to his short fiction. (I’ve yet to read his acclaimed novel.) These are dark, darkly humorous, and engaging tales; the settings and characters vary so widely, and are just so somehow specific or human or something, that I’m a bit in awe of this guy’s range. Setting aside the feeling that one or two stories in the collection’s middle wrap up too soon, and somehow unsatisfyingly--a problem for many writers of short stories I think, and recalling George Saunders articulation of the difficulty: “How to end without sucking”--I will definitely be recommending this one. His memorable characters at the fringes of our strange now and our stranger, perhaps uglier near-future will resonate with readers of Saunders and Karen Russell, among others.
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The best stories in this collection are the first ('Teen Sniper') and the last ('The Eighth Sea'). The others are good as well, but they pale in comparison with the two mentioned.
If you are in a jolly mood, and would like to change that, this is the book for you. It said something on the cover about showing the solitude that connects us all. Boy is that true.
I found myself taking a break from this book. Not because of the writing (which I thought at first), but because the stories are *heavy*. Not necessarily in a bad way, but the topics they dive into...well, I needed a couple of breaks now and then. So don't be surprised if you find yourself losing the will(power) to read this book - I guess it just means you're human.
