Note special day and time for this Writers Series event.

Adam Johnson is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. His novel The Orphan Master's Son has just been published by Random House.

He focuses on characters at the edge of society, for whom isolation and disconnection are nearly permanent conditions. The New York Times has described his central theme as a "melancholy melody of longing and loss: a Salingeresqe sense of adolescent alienation and confusion combined with an acute awareness of the randomness of life and the difficulty of making and sustaining connections." His work also has a strain of absurdity. "Teen Sniper" is about a young sniper prodigy enlisted by the Palo Alto police department to suppress the disgruntled workers of Silicon Valley. "The Canadanaut" follows a remote team of Canadian weapons developers racing to beat the Americans to the moon.

Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona, and is now based in San Francisco. He is a lecturer at Stanford University. A Whiting Writers’ Award winner, his work has been published in Esquire, Harper's, Tin House, The Paris Review, and the collections The Best New American Voices and The Best American Short Stories, and it has been translated into 13 languages, including French, Japanese, Catalan, and Serbian. He is also a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.