Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son
Publication Day Celebration
- When
- Tue Jan 10, 2012
- Where
- The Booksmith
- Time
- 7:30 pm
- Tags
- Literary Arts
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Description
When Adam Johnson first started researching North Korea, he was writing an ironic story called “The Best North Korean Short Story of 2005,” a playful take on how Kim Jong Il dictates a single ridiculous narrative for a country of 23 million. But once Johnson read the heartbreaking firsthand stories of North Korean defectors, he abandoned his original idea and began instead a novel about an average citizen coming of age during the famine. He also felt he had no choice but to travel there himself, and experience life in one of the most isolated countries on earth. There, he discovered – despite the screening of his three government minders – a place where every woman wears the same color lipstick, starving families forage for chestnuts in trees, pedestrians are randomly scooped up for “volunteer” labor, and loudspeakers blast nonstop patriotic anthems.From his rare observations, Adam Johnson – whose previous fiction has been hailed as “remarkable” by The New Yorker and as having “great ingenuity and bravado” by The New York Times – created THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON. In this big-hearted, haunting, and boldly imaginative novel, Johnson interweaves the story of a young man named Jun Do with the official North Korean narrative as dictated by Kim Jong Il. As readers follow Jun Do from his orphanage work camp to his job as kidnapper of unsuspecting Japanese, through his time monitoring radio waves on a fishing boat to his dangerous impersonation of a government minister, they are exposed to the weird and wild textures of a corrupt country where the slightest mistake is punishable by death.
THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON is a knuckle-biting literary thriller from a masterful storyteller, as well as a courageous meditation on what it means to be free
Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s and Tin House, as well as in Best New American Voices. His other works include Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.
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