Emporium: Stories (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "When I reach the rooftop, I pull the dustcovers off my rifle scope and head for a folding chair leaned up against an air-conditioning unit-right..." (more)
Key Phrases: trauma plate, cliff gods, tile palace, Super Sport, Spirit Squad, Fly Away (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A disturbing sense of paranoia drifts through the nine stories in Emporium, Adam Johnson's stunning debut. But beneath the uneasy surface of the freakishly memorable landscapes depicted in this original collection lies the familiar trappings of adolescence: strip malls and cul-de-sacs, stifling suburbs, teenage crushes and rebellions, absent parents, and a frightening, unpromising future.

In "Teen Sniper," a lonely 15-year-old LAPD marksman, whose only friend is ROMS, the squad's bomb-detecting robot, can snuff out a life in a heartbeat from 475 meters away yet can't connect with the girl of his dreams standing right in front of his nose. In this unsettling story, the sniper visualizes the impact wounds of his victims--renegade employees of Silicon Valley software companies--as beautiful floral imagery.

Duck, you fool, I can't help whispering.

The slug goes, connects--a neck shot, my trademark, the wound lapping like the tongues of orchid petals. The target's knees go out, and he falls from view, dropping into the beige of his cubicle.

A real standout in this powerful collection is "Your Own Backyard." A former police officer turned rent-a-cop works the night shift at a Phoenix zoo, where he has the undesirable job of eliminating the unwanted animals ("young ones, old ones, sick ones, extra ones"). Yellow Post-it notes stuck to the guard shack serve as death sentences, his assignments for the night. This troubled father views his unpredictable young son's increased fascination with violence as the all-too-familiar shadow of a criminal mind in the making. "Trauma Plate" features a teenager acting out against her parents--who run a bulletproof-vest rental shop in a deserted strip mall--by daring her crush to take a shot at her Kevlar covered heart; a Louisiana family counts down the hours until the ATF slams into their home in the atmospheric "The Jughead of Berlin"; and in "The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite," a 19-year-old slacker occupies his time by driving a party bus filled with the members of his late mother's cancer support group. Despite the unusually edgy nature of the stories, at its core, Emporium is surprisingly moving--its characters aching to connect in an ominous, uncertain world. Keep Adam Johnson on your literary radar; Emporium is a searing debut from a writer to watch. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly

Suburban life throbs with paranoid violence in the subtly skewed, futuristic world that Johnson envisions in this nervy debut collection of nine stories, each bristling with inventive energy. Trapped in their high-tech surroundings, his characters are unable to navigate a hazardous social maze, but unsure of how to live outside it. "Teen Sniper" depicts a sour aftermath of corporate meltdown. Fifteen-year-old Tim is the leader of a sniper squad whose targets are renegade employees. He struggles to think of flowers as he takes aim through Hewlett Packard's windows, an attempt at positive imagery that is cruelly mirrored by the sumptuous corporate flower beds below. Meanwhile, a touching tale of adolescent confusion unfolds: Tim can stop his heartbeat when he takes aim, but he still can't talk to girls. A sense of alienated adolescence pervades each of these nine stories, even those in which the characters are fully grown. Johnson conveys a powerful blend of stunted development and premature knowledge, showing emptiness and neglect in a harsh new light. In the masterful "Cliff Gods of Acapulco," the narrator recalls "the boxy loop of youth, a decade that leaves your ears ringing with television and loneliness," and Johnson seamlessly depicts the merging of teenage lethargy with adult introspection amid the havoc wreaked by a plane crash, a father lost in Africa and an assortment of vicious animals. "The Canadanaut" deals with isolation taken to a dazzling extreme: Canadian scientists live in "scientific seclusion" in the frozen wasteland of northern Canada, where they race to achieve the first moon landing. Each of these unusual, skillful stories exhibits a fierce talent, showcasing Johnson's quirky humor and slicing insight. Agent, Warren Frazier. (Apr. 1)Forecast: Johnson, whose fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's and the Paris Review, has already attracted a small crowd of fervent admirers who should snap up his debut collection.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Ed.- 1st Printing edition (March 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670030724
• ISBN-13: 978-0670030729
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,079,255 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As Good As It Gets, April 4, 2002

By	Stephen Elliott (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I thought this book of stories was about as good as it gets. The stories, which are strange as hell, were also deeply insightful. How Adam can tell a story about a ma and pop bullet proof vest shop and turn it into a story about a girl leaving home, is beyond me. But he does it. He starts with these wild premises, like a teenage sniper working for a Silicon Valley Police Department, and turns them into moral fables about the pain of growing up, of first love, the push pull of parents and their children.

In some ways he's writing about the most basic things, fathers who don't understand their sons, adolescent love stories. It's just that he's doing it all in such a new and original way. To find a comparison I would probably have to go to Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome To The Monkey House. But in technique he's much closer to Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff and their clean, determined prose.

It's really hard to imagine a short story lover not enjoying this book. If nothing else, and if you're too poor to buy a book in hardcover, grab it off the shelf at the bookstore and read the second story, Your Own Backyard.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like the finest prophecy,, April 24, 2002

By	Neil Connelly (Louisiana) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Emporium delivers a vision that produces a profound and immediate sense of rightness. More than just a glimpse into the future of our baffling world, Johnson provides a preview of where fiction itself is heading. Prepare yourself for characters more real than your mother, language that demands to be read aloud, images that will delight and haunt. This book soars in the same rarified air as the best collections of our time: The Night in Question, Birds of America, Poachers, Dogfight, CivilWarland, Hotel Eden. I'll end with my own prediction; years from now, you'll be having a drink with friends arguing about who read Adam Johnson first. Count on it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not much to say but. . ., June 26, 2002

By A Customer

this is a fine debut by a writer we're all going to have to watch closely. Most short story collections have one or two zingers, and the rest of the pieces are so-so or just plain filler. There stories crackle with wit and linguistic energy. Perhaps Mr. Johnson might come off as a bit paranoid--or at least the characters in his stories seem to be--but I'll read another collection as finely written as this in a heartbeat. Bravo.