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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Adam Johnson is the author of Fortune Smiles, which won the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and The Orphan Master's Son, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award. His previous books include the short story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. Johnson was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Stanford University.
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A Conversation Between Adam Johnson and Vincent Scarpa about Fortune Smiles and Other Topics
Vincent Scarpa is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and managing editor of The Austin Review.
Vincent Scarpa: How long have these stories been in your arsenal? Were they all completed after The Orphan Master's Son, or were some in the works before that?
Adam Johnson: That's a good question. One story, "Hurricanes Anonymous," I wrote earlier. In the middle of Orphan Master's Son, I knew that I needed to use a certain kind of third person with a certain kind of distance that I'd never really deployed before, and so I stopped writing that book and I figured, Let me test it out. So I wrote that story, "Hurricanes Anonymous," that was really ratcheted down and limited in a certain way, as a kind of test run to see if I could do that over a bigger novel. So that story came earlier, but the other five came after I finished the novel. I had just missed stories. I love everything about stories and I'd been just jonesing to write some.
VS: Was there any trepidation on your end, or on the publishing end, in putting out a book of stories—thought of by some these...
Tash Aw is the author of four novels, including We, the Survivors, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, both finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has also won the Whitbread and ... (more)
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The Orphan Master's Son
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Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL during a furious blizzard that dropped over 20 inches of snow on the ground and wreaked havoc all over Chicago. Writing has been her life-long passion, but as an undergraduate she ... (more)
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