Adam Johnson is the author of Fortune Smiles, winner of the National Book Award and the Story Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Johnson’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award in Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. His previous books are Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.
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Parasites Like UsA Novel
The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.
Parasites Like Us:A Novel -
Parasites Like UsA Novel
The GTO began to go down. A surge of water washed out of the hole in all directions, an ankle-deep wave that turned the frosted ice clear black. Only as the water soaked my boots, making them seem perched atop a sheet of smoked glass, did I realize that something else had happened, that, as the black of a hot rod slipped into the abyss of the lake, my Corvette had started to baby-crawl backward toward the hole.
Parasites Like Us:A Novel -
Parasites Like UsA Novel
They handed me receipts for all my property, and then I was placed in a white room that had once been part of the vast kitchen—still visible in the floor were marks where the old industrial freezers had been bolted down. Here I was forced to watch an orientation video. Following that, I had my head and nethers shaved, and was ordered to drink a chalky liquid, then made to urinate into a paper cup. Next, I was briefly violated, and before the rubber gloves even popped off, without so much as a glass of orange juice to calm my nerves, I was dusted with a delousing powder that tasted, in my nose and mouth, bitter as vitamin C.
Parasites Like Us:A Novel
“A great novel can take implausible fact and turn it into entirely believable fiction. That’s the genius of The Orphan Master’s Son. Adam Johnson has taken the papier-mâché creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable. This is a novel worth getting excited about, one which more than delivers on its pre-publication buzz . . . I haven’t liked a new novel this much in years, and I want to share the simple pleasure of reading the book. But I also think it’s an instructive lesson in how to paint a fictional world against a background of fact: The secret is research . . . It’s this process of re-imagination that makes the fictional locale so real and gives the novel an impact you could never achieve with a thousand newspaper stories. Johnson has painted in indelible colors the nightmare of Kim’s North Korea. When English readers want to understand what it was about—how people lived and died inside a cult of personality that committed unspeakable crimes against its citizens—I hope they will turn to this carefully documented story. The happy surprise is that they will find it such a page turner.” —The Washington Post
“All of these elements—stylistic panache, technical daring, moral weight and an uncanny sense of the current moment—combine in Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, the single best work of fiction published in 2012 . . . The book's cunning, flair and pathos are testaments to the still-formidable power of the written word.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Adam Johnson . . . is gifted with a delightful, vibrant and occasionally all-encompassing vision. His Parasites Like Us is a strange, remarkable novel that is hilarious and infused with sparklingly imaginative and vivid detail—part love story, part midlife crisis, part anthropological treatise and part futuristic science fiction.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Selected Works
