Parasites Like Us

By the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013, Adam Johnson's highly acclaimed debut novel: Some lost civilizations are better left buried ...

A fantastically twisted and terrifying first novel

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for his second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Orphan Master’s Son (‘Excavates the very meaning of life’ New York Times). His short story 'Nirvana' won the prestigious Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of acclaimed story collections, Fortune Smiles and Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives with his family in San Francisco.

*The debut novel by the author of THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON: winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013 
 
After trashing his cherry '72 Corvette, illegally breaking into an ancient burial site, and snacking on 12,000-year-old popcorn, Hank Hannah finds that he's inadvertently unleashed the apocalypse. Hank, a professor of anthropology back in the days when there were still co-eds to ogle and now one of only twelve humans still alive on earth, decides to record the last days of human civilization for whomever - or whatever - might replace us.

Stories

Emporium

The acclaimed and explosive debut short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction 2013

Adam Johnson's stories capture youth's torque, its weird braid of exhilaration and loneliness. Except there's nothing humdrum here. Each of Johnson's fantasies, each peculiar landscape, glows hot with imagination

Masterful ... beautifully crafted ... achingly poignant ... cleverly funny

Johnson's audacious work blows the covers off the short story and leaves the genre newly invigorated

* By the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013 and the EFG/Sunday Times Best Short Story Award 2014 
 
* 'An idiosyncratic and compelling voice' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 
 
An ATF raid, a moonshot gone wrong, a busload of female cancer victims determined to live life to the fullest - these are some of the compelling themes explored in this funny, sad, brilliantly bizarre debut collection. A lovesick teenage Cajun girl, a gay astrophysicist, a teenage sniper on Los Angeles police payroll, a post apocalyptic bulletproof-vest salesman - each seeks connection and meaning in landscapes made uncertain by the voids parents and lovers should fill.

Barack Obama’s Summer Reading Pick 2019

The Orphan Master's Son

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 - the dark and hilarious story of a young man's passage through the prison camps and dictatorship of North Korea. For fans of THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE and CLOUD ATLAS

Excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice

An addictive novel of daring ingenuity; a study of sacrifice and freedom in a citizen-eating dynasty; and a timely reminder that anonymous victims of oppression are also human beings who love. A brave and impressive book.

You know you are in the hands of someone who can tell a story. Fantastic

Johnson unleashes a big, thrilling, and fully realized talent

Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad

Adam Johnson has managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I&rsquo;ve read &hellip; The Orphan Master&rsquo;s Son deserves a place up there with dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World

Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea

An addictive novel of daring ingenuity; a study of sacrifice and freedom in a citizen-eating dynasty; and a timely reminder that anonymous victims of oppression are also human beings who love. A brave and impressive book

David Mitchell, author of THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET

A flamboyantly grim epic of totalitarianism… this larger-than-life, two-fisted picaresque manages to be a page-turner... an ambitious book

One of those books where you know you’ve found yourself in the hands of someone who can really tell a story, and is yet not naïve about the artificiality of stories. The conceit is fantastic: a narration partly told through the loud speakers of the North Korean regime.

Fast-paced and intriguing.. this complex, multi-voiced narrative will remind some readers of David Mitchell’s similarly inventive tale, Cloud Atlas… It is magnificent

What we have here are the ingredients of an across-the-board smash hit: sympathetic characters, an exotic, unknowable setting and a plot that will carry you along more convincingly than any of the fictions used by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Adam Johnson has managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I’ve read… The Orphan Master’s Son deserves a place up there with dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World

Barbara Demick, author of NOTHING TO ENVY: REAL LIVES IN NORTH KOREA

A clever, wildly original novel, with an ultimately thrilling plot

Adam Johnson has pulled off literary alchemy, first by setting his novel in North Korea, a country that few of us can imagine, then by producing such compelling characters whose lives unfold at breakneck speed. I was engrossed right to the amazing conclusion. The result is pure gold, a terrific novel

Abraham Verghese, author of CUTTING FOR STONE

A fascinating insight into one of the world's most closed-off nations

...a feat of sorcery that is audacious and utterly unsettling... Johnson has a remarkable eye for detail... to evoke at once what it feels like to be in such a place, and how it must have felt had things been very different there, are vast feats that Adam Johnson accomplishes with ingenuity and with towering empathy

Remarkable... Mr. Johnson is a wonderfully flexible writer who can pivot in a matter of lines from absurdity to atrocity. We don't know what's really going on in that strange place, but a disquieting glimpse suggesting what it must be like can be found in this brilliant and timely novel

Mr. Johnson has written a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice

Johnson's imaginative gifts are in full flower [in The Orphan Master's Son]

One image that lingered in the wake of Kim Jong Il's recent death was ordinary North Koreans overcome by grief, breaking down in the street over the loss of the ''Dear Leader'' who had terrorized them for years. Could they truly be so sad about the loss of this despot? Were they acting out of fear?... The answers Adam Johnson imagines are both vivid and chilling

Adam Johnson’s novel is likely to feature among the best-of lists for 2012... highly recommended

The surreal peculiarities of North Korea are conjured in this brilliant multivoiced novel... laced with a mixture of parody and horror, which is all the more hilarious for being so hard to tell apart

Like an epic version of George Orwell’s 1984, this novel ranges from the bottom of North Korea’s social ladder to its top, with plenty of affecting, wayward and even comic supporting characters. It’s the horror and absurdity of life in a totalitarian state as it might have been depicted by Balzac

Remarkable and heartbreaking . . . To [the] very short list of exceptional novels that also serve a humanitarian purpose The Orphan Master’s Son must now be added

Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His second novel THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 and was a New York Times bestseller. His short story NIRVANA won the EFG/Sunday Times Best Short Story Award 2014. He lives in San Francisco with his family.

The award-winning and New York Times bestselling novel: a dark and witty story of the rise of a young orphan in the surreal and tyrannical regime of North Korea. 
 
'You know you are in the hands of someone who can tell a story. Fantastic' ZADIE SMITH 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST 
 
------ 
 
Young Pak Jun Do is convinced he is special. He knows he must be the unique son of the master of the orphanage, and definitely not some kid dumped by his parents. Surely it was obvious from the way his father singled him out for regular beating? 
 
He finds his calling when he is picked as a spy and kidnapper for his nation, the glorious Democratic Republic of North Korea. 
 
He knows he must find his true love, Sun Moon, the greatest opera star who ever lived, before it&rsquo;s too late. 
 
He knows he&rsquo;s not like the other prisoners in the camp. 
 
He&rsquo;s going to get out soon. 
 
Isn't he? 
 
This hilarious, dark literary epic of a young boy's rise in North Korea from orphan to high-ranking officer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. 
Adam Johnson is working on a new work of fiction. 
 
'An addictive novel of daring ingenuity' DAVID MITCHELL 
'Excavates the very meaning of life' NEW YORK TIMES

Adam Johnson

It is impossible not to be awed by these stories. Life, marriage, love, death, are all described here in the most amazingly unexpected ways; it seems at times that Adam, like the greatest of the great writers, has some kind of supernatural facility that allows him to see through to the pitch black core of things and to create a crystalline portrait of what he witnesses

DONAL RYAN, author of the bestselling THE SPINNING HEART

Unputdownable is an overused word, but at their best these stories are completely gripping.

Johnson has a rare combination of inventiveness, intellectual pyrotechnics and emotional sophistication . . . These stories are treasures.

Johnson packs more voice in his stories than most authors do in a novel

...formidable, meaty tales that cling on and don’t let go.

[Adam Johnson] is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader.

Adam Johnson . . . demonstrates again his boundless imagination, his ability to capture an entire personality in a few perfectly chosen details, and his gift for making foreign territory feel utterly familiar. Johnson is willing to go into real darkness and send a beacon back from the depths of tragedy, and his voice is as inevitable and fresh as anything being written today.

[Adam Johnson] serves up six sinewy stories that shock and surprise in his edgy, inviting Fortune Smiles . . . compulsively readable.

[A] riveting collection of short stories ... darkly imagined, slightly surreal

Exhilarating ... His mastery of setting simply wowed me.

Marked by the conflicts of heart and mind, and the exuberant quality of its compassionate prose.

Compulsively readable ... Johnson serves up six sinewy stories that shock and surprise.

A rare combination of inventiveness, intellectual pyrotechnics and emotional sophistication ... these stories are treasures.

Bittersweet, elegant, full of ward-won wisdom: this is no ordinary book either.

Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

Hefty and memorable ...the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sing into worlds we otherwise know little or nothing about.

Terrific. Shows exactly why Johnson is rated as one of the hottest writers of his generation.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2015 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 
WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES EFG SHORT STORY AWARD 2014 
 
By the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner of THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON - for fans of international literary fiction, especially Hanya Yanigahara, Jonathan Franzen and Anthony Doerr. 
 
'Unputdownable is an overused word, but at their best these stories are completely gripping.' Sunday Times 
 
'Ironic, witty, super-intelligent' - The Times 
 
'Terrific. Shows exactly why Johnson is rated as one of the hottest American writers of his generation' Mail on Sunday 
 
 
 
Adam Johnson takes you into the minds of characters you never thought you would meet – a former Stasi prison warden in denial of his past, a refugee from North Korea unsettled by his new freedom, a UPS driver in hurricane-torn Louisiana looking for the mother of his son. 
 
These are tales of love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal. Tender, wry, utterly compelling, they show us humanity where you might least expect it.

Adam Johnson

Praise for Fortune Smiles: Stories

Ironic, witty, super-intelligent

It is impossible not to be awed by these stories. Life, marriage, love, death, are all described here in the most amazingly unexpected ways; it seems at times that Adam, like the greatest of the great writers, has s ...

Unputdownable is an overused word, but at their best these stories are completely gripping.

Ironic, witty, super-intelligent

It is impossible not to be awed by these stories. Life, marriage, love, death, are all described here in the most amazingly unexpected ways; it seems at times that Adam, like the greatest of the great writers, has s ...

Unputdownable is an overused word, but at their best these stories are completely gripping.

Ironic, witty, super-intelligent

It is impossible not to be awed by these stories. Life, marriage, love, death, are all described here in the most amazingly unexpected ways; it seems at times that Adam, like the greatest of the great writers, has s ...

Unputdownable is an overused word, but at their best these stories are completely gripping.

Books by Adam Johnson

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