Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, Granta and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His books include the story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. His new book is The Orphan Master's Son (Random House), which follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Johnson lives in San Francisco.
On your nightstand now:
I have several advance reader editions: The Night Swimmer by Matt Bondurant, A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois, Monstress by Lysley Tenorio, Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I wasn't a rabid reader as a kid. I read Tolkien and a lot of series books. I guess the book that marked the cusp of being a child reader and an adult reader was The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. I was probably 14 when I read it, and that book was my dark initiation into literature--the portrait of a bright, quirky father who, with relatively good intentions, directs his son down a path of peril led to a kind of literary self-recognition that I've been chasing ever since.
Your top five authors:
My top authors list is pretty easy: Robert Stone, Jennifer Egan, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy and Tobias Wolff.
Book you've faked reading:
What book haven't I faked having read at some point! I remember as an undergrad I tried to befriend the super-cool circle of grad fiction writers. They were all taking a Joyce seminar, and at a party (that I wasn't invited to) I pretended to have read Ulysses. Sensing this, one of them confided in me the real secret to understanding Ulysses: to read it backwards. Poor me! I went and got a copy and attempted to read the last chapter first.
Book you're an evangelist for:
If by evangelical, you mean proselytizing without personal regard, then I've probably put more books by Ron Carlson into the hands of strangers than any other. I mean it, if someone asked on the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] what I was reading, I'd just hand the Carlson away with a knowing smile of conversion.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I bought Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for the cover, and guess what: the book was amazing!
Book that changed your life:
Since I'm a writer, the book that changed my life is the book that changed how I write. That book was Libra by Don DeLillo. Only after that book did I understand what a sentence, or partial sentence, could do.
Favorite line from a book:
I could quote Moby Dick all day, but when I go to write, when I clear my imaginative space of all the clutter and to-do lists of normal life, when I'm just about able to inhabit the blankness of creation but before I actually invent something, the Dickinson poem "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" tends to creep in.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I feel like I just got that pleasure by rereading Madame Bovary in Lydia Davis's new translation.
Is it true that you and your wife were married six times, and the final ceremony took place in Death Valley, with the two of you wearing bullet-proof vests and shooting each other in the heart with Olympic target-match pistols?
Yes.