Credit: Smeeta Mahanti Credit: Tamara Beckwith | | COME CELEBRATE THE PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION WITH AWARD-WINNER ADAM JOHNSON and the remarkable debut novel from ANTHONY MARRA Friday, July 12, 7:30 p.m. The Orphan Master's Son A Constellation of Vital Phenomena We are thrilled to welcome this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Adam Johnson, back to Kepler's for an encore reading and a conversation with his colleague and fellow writer Anthony Marra, whose first novel is wowing readers across the country. This evening it's time to celebrate Adam's success (not only the Pulitzer...but the Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist citation....), and we invite you to join the conversation and the raising of glasses to both Adam and his success and Tony Marra's spectacular arrival on the literary scene. Champagne, anyone? Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His novel, The Orphan Master's Son, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a Gold Medal for California Book Awards in the Fiction category. 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 other works include Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. The Orphan Master's Son is a riveting portrait of a world rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. The Orphan Master’s Son performs an unusual form of sorcery, taking a frankly cruel and absurd reality and somehow converting it into a humane and believable fiction. It’s an epic feat of story-telling. It’s thrillingly written, and it's just a thrilling period.” -- Zadie Smith, Los Angeles Times Anthony Marra is the winner of a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, The Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, and the Narrative Prize, and his work was anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. In A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra takes us to snow-covered Chechnya during the Second Chechen War. The novel, a remarkable decade-spanning debut, opens with eight-year-old Havaa looking on as her father is dragged off by Russian soldiers for a crime he did not commit. | | |