Adam Johnson has long been interested in trauma. Best known for his 2013 novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written about North Korean gulags, apocalyptic epidemics, and future Americas where everyone must wear bulletproof vests at all times. He has even taught a writing class on trauma narrative, where he told his students that while traditional stories begin with a character’s desire, “the trauma narrative is the opposite.” Johnson said. “Instead of our hero moving toward achieving his desire, he’s evading what’s difficult to control,” he said. “He’s constantly escaping what he doesn’t want to deal with.”

His new short story collection, Fortune Smiles, similarly plumbs the depths of trauma-based decision making. But unlike The Orphan Master’s Son, in which we see the consequences of choice and circumstance tick along to their conclusions, the nature of the stories—short—means that we see only the characters’ hesitant first steps. What’s to come lives solely in our imagination. That’s not to say the stories are devoid of plot, but more than anything they come across as intensely magnified slices of life—peeks at a railway interchange where characters are set on a track to be good or bad for the rest of their lives, where they can choose to be absent fathers, pedophiles, jealous wives, or somehow find a new course to travel.

But while Johnson’s stories are set in trauma-laden scenarios like post-hurricane coastal Louisiana and post-communist East Berlin, Johnson never relies on the setting to draw readers in or to do the brunt of his character building. Instead, his characters openly confess their deepest flaws, calling on the reader to empathize rather than to judge. The former Stasi prison warden makes no effort to hide his past position, a man describes in excruciating detail how he views child pornography, and a woman who has had a double mastectomy announces, “I’m going to discuss the breasts of every woman who crosses my path.” Johnson’s narrators ferry readers across these depths with wry witticisms, pop cultural jokes, and a belief in humanity’s resilience.

Even as Johnson’s subject matter bends genre is a way that is assertively contemporary, much of his prose is classically beautiful. One depiction of North Korea in “Fortune Smiles,” the title story in which three defectors struggle to adjust to life in Seoul, describes “Gantry cranes frozen under fat white clouds; abandoned zinc carts crenellated with frost; rusted conveyor belts standing sentinel over garbage-glinting icebergs drifting south from Vladivostok.”

Johnson’s particular blend of cultural satire and melancholic prose, as well as his balance between the broadly historical and closely personal, is wholly original, but the influence of other contemporary writers is evident. The speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell, which also trade in inherited traumas and personal resilience, come to mind, as do George Saunders’ darkly satiric visions of near-future America. But where Saunders’ stories take one poisonous aspect of society and play it out to its damning, inevitable endpoint, Johnson crafts a subtler web of personal choice and societal obsessions.