Orphan Master Cracks PW Bestseller List

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, who visited last Tuesday, has made it to the Publishers Weeekly hardcover bestseller list.

PW says: "Following lots of bookseller and sales rep love early on, Random House built a 13-city tour for Johnson's second novel, which was selected for eight signed first edition clubs. A September 21 media lunch for the author spurred several extravagant notices...."

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#7 on the Bestseller List

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, who visits today, Tuesday, Feb. 14th, is #7 on the Washington Post's hardcover fiction bestseller list.

Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post review by David Ignatius:

"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-mache creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable."

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Adam Johnson in the Times Union

"Johnson's research for the book [The Orphan Master's Son] included a closely monitored 2007 trip to North Korea. In an article for The Daily Beast, he described the odd sensation upon discovering that many of the photos he'd taken were slight variations on innumerable images taken by other tourists on a strictly controlled path."

"When you walk up to a North Korean and say, 'Hey, how are you doing?' or 'What's going on?' — those are aggressive, dangerous questions in a totalitarian state," Johnson said.

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Johnson visits this Valentine's Day, 2/14.

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Can North Korea Be Fictionalized?

"In the stories we tell ourselves in the West, we expect to be the central character in our own narrative; we are a society of individuals and no matter how much we love others, they're secondary characters. The DPRK is exactly the opposite. There's one national narrative, tailored and maintained by script writers and censors. In a totalitarian world that script writer is responsible for everything that happened."

"If you're a secondary character in North Korea, your aptitude for certain things and your class background sends you down paths, maybe to be a doctor, or a peasant farmer, or a soldier, or a music player. Your own wants and desires are only going to get in the way of the role you've been given and that you have to play if you're going to survive."

Isaac Stone Fish interviews Adam Johnson in the journal Foreign Policy.

Johnson visits Tuesday, Feb. 14th.

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North Korean Love Story for Valentine's Day, 2/14

"Jun Do's mother was a singer. That was all Jun Do's father, the Orphan Master, would say about her. The Orphan Master kept a photograph of a woman in his small room at Long Tomorrows. She was quite lovely-eyes large and sideways looking, lips pursed with an unspoken word. Since beautiful women in the provinces get shipped to Pyongyang, that's certainly what had happened to his mother. The real proof of this was the Orphan Master himself. At night, he'd drink, and from the barracks, the orphans would hear him weeping and lamenting, striking half-heard bargains with the woman in the photograph. Only Jun Do was allowed to comfort him, to finally take the bottle from his hands."

"As the oldest boy at Long Tomorrows, Jun Do had responsibilities - portioning the food, assigning bunks, renaming the new boys from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution. Even so, the Orphan Master was serious about showing no favoritism to his son, the only boy at Long Tomorrows who wasn't an orphan. When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spent the night locked in it. When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the floor. Jun Do didn't brag to the other boys that he was the son of the Orphan Master, rather than some kid dropped off by parents on their way to a 9-27 camp. If someone wanted to figure it out, it was pretty obvious- Jun Do had been there before all of them, and the reason he'd never been adopted was because his father would never let someone take his only son. And it made sense that after his mother was stolen to Pyongyang, his father had applied for the one position that would allow him to both earn a living and watch over his son."

To read more, visit your local bookstore and buy the book!

Adam Johnson talks about his North Korean love story this coming Valentine's Day, Tuesday, February 14th.

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The Most Un-Korean Person in the World

Adam Johnson, who visits Tuesday, February 14 to talk about his thriller-romance set in North Korea, talks to the L. A. Times about his background.

"A gregarious, linebacker-sized guy of mixed Northern European and Native American extraction, dressed in a white guayabera shirt, jeans and electric-green running shoes, he describes himself as 'probably the most un-Korean person in the world.' He was born in South Dakota but grew up in the Arizona suburbs of Tempe and Scottsdale, an only child and latchkey kid, raised mostly by his clinical psychologist mother after his parents divorced. 'As a kid I just wandered the neighborhoods and alleys of Arizona on my bicycle. And I think I had a pretty big interior life, I had a big imaginary life. One of the things I loved to do was open trash dumpsters. I would go through the alleys and open the trash dumpsters and just look at what people threw away and find treasures and try to figure out who lived in those houses.'"

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