From conception to publication, writing is a true labor of love. That’s Adam Johnson getting ready to sign The Orphan Master’s Son at Lemuria on January 27, 2012.
Please indulge this bookseller–It’s not every day that the novel you care so much about wins the most coveted prize in literary fiction.
The amount of reading a Lemuria bookseller does is considerable. This does not even count the amount of time we spend thinking about what to read and sifting through novels that will not matter five years from now.
We also value the hard work of our publisher reps in helping us find some of the best contemporary fiction. Toni Hetzel of Random House put The Orphan Master’s Son in my hand. I was wowed by it and wanted everyone to read it. Because we got to work on this book early, we were able to hold a signing and reading with Adam Johnson in January 2012 and select it as our January First Editions Club pick. We have been so proud to champion Adam Johnson’s work.
USA Today reports that Adam Johnson found out he had won the Pulitzer through a mere text message on his phone. Adam says:
“How can you be prepared for this kind of news? It will mean so much to the readership of the book, and I hope, will get more people to contemplate what’s happening there. North Koreans aren’t allowed to tell their own story. Others have to do it for them.”
To close, here’s an essay by Adam Johnson about his travel to North Korea, originally posted in January of 2012 with the author’s permission.
“We are all Korean”
Upon arriving in Pyongyang, one of our first stops was the National Museum of Korean History. It was a large museum with no one in it. To save electricity, which was quite scarce, the museum used motion sensors that turned out the lights when you left a room and flashed them on when you entered the next, so the cavernous journey was taken one flashing glimpse at a time. The first exhibit they showed me was what they claimed was an old skull fragment. It was displayed in a Plexiglas box atop a white pedestal. They informed me that the skull was 4.5 million years old and that it had been found on the shores of the Taedong River in Pyongyang. I was new to such tours, so my brain was filled with dissonance. I asked the museum docent, a middle-aged woman wearing a beautiful choson-ot, if humanity didn’t originate in Africa. “Pyongyang,” she said. I’d taken a course on human origins when I was an undergraduate, and a hazy memory came to me. I said, “So is this a skull fragment from an australopithecine?” She said, “No, Korean.” And I understood that she was a person trained to give a tour and recite prescribed information, not a scholar or curator. In North Korea, whenever evidence is lacking for something, they use a big painting or an elaborate diorama as proof. They had both on hand to explain via arrows and diagrams, how humanity had originated in Pyongyang, with the following Diaspora moving north into Asia and west into the Middle East and Europe. Finally, according to the diorama, humans populated Africa and North America. We had several minders with us, all watching my response to this new information. Finally, our tour guide concluded her lecture by informing me that the World was Korean (by which she meant North Korean) and by informing me that I was actually Korean. A friend of mine, a fellow professor on the tour with me, turned to me and said, “Did you hear, Professor Johnson? You are Korean. Do you feel suddenly Korean?”
I pat my arms and sides. “Yes,” I said, “I feel a little more Korean.”
He said, “You look a little more Korean.”
I rubbed my cheek and chin. “Yes,” I said, “I believe I’m a little more Korean.”
Our tour guide and minders all nodded, with some gravity, at my dawning realization.
So the lesson I learned in the National Museum of Korean History was that there was no irony in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
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