"It's a beautiful, foggy day in San Francisco," says Adam Johnson when I reach him by phone in late August. The author of (Random House), a new collection of brazen, no-he-didn't-just-do-that short stories, doesn't know how striking it is for me to hear his real voice. Then again, the Pulitzer Prize winner (in 2013 for his acclaimed novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master's Son) is more unassuming than most.

For the past month, I've lived with several of Johnson's voices, all of which belong to his characters, who sound alarmingly real on the page—among them, a 40-something breast cancer survivor, a pair of North Korean defectors, and a husband who yearns to connect with his sickly wife ("Nirvana," available here). I spoke with Johnson, who sounds far more grounded than his characters would have me believe, to learn about his approach to writing, "the great lie of cinema," and where American literature is headed.

The characters in Fortune Smiles have such a distinct stories. How did you come up with them and how would you describe your approach to fiction?

I guess it takes a concern, and I was especially concerned. Like in the Katrina story, 30,000 people were evacuated, only to be hit again by another hurricane. Those people were school students, prisoners, disabled people, and to get hit twice and have your family broken twice, I really wanted to study that. It made me think about what institutions survive when the police evacuate and the power's out. Honestly, Walmart opened up their stores and gave every single item away. Chuck E. Cheese, a Christian group, gave away pizza forever.

For me, the least interesting approach is, "Oh, I'll be four people who got their lives messed up." That's like a recipe for sentimentality. [In] I came up with this character who's lost everything he had already. He realizes maybe it's a good thing to do. Having an unsympathetic narrator was important, too. And then the story writes itself.

"For me, the least interesting approach is, 'I'll be four people who got their lives messed up.'"

I find that hard to believe—these are difficult stories to write.

I always go for the most conflict-intense moments, the ones that make me stand up and walk away. I never know where something is going to go. I have a general sense. It's all in the moment-to-moment evocation of normal life. With fiction you make that the most important, defining point of a person's life.

I really do believe you've got to write the story you want to read. And I love stories that are moment-to-moment. The first 10 pages it's just, like, one scene, and in that first big scene, I come to believe the people and the characters and feel like they're in the shit, and if I don't get that, then I don't go on or set it aside. You put these elements in, and it's a meaning-making machine and it's going to come up with an answer and often one that I never saw coming. It's the opposite of having a plan. At the end of "Nirvana," I had no idea it was going to go into that last scene.

Let's talk about "Nirvana" for a moment, because it's such a remarkable story. How did the idea for it come about?

My wife was sick and she was going through chemotherapy, and it was really tough on our family and kids. She's totally healthy now, but it was scary, and while that happened my old college roommate that I lived with for years took his life. I couldn't really go to his funeral or deal with that because I was needed here. In college, my roommate was a Nirvana fanatic, and it was like the soundtrack to four years of my life. So, my brain takes what's going on with my life and processes it through narrative existence. I had a dream one night that a drone came to my window, and I opened it and the drone just stared at me, and I knew it was my old friend. And then I do research. I picked another illness other than cancer for that story and I just started going.

That seems like enough material for a novel. Why did you write it as a short story?

I'm completely enamored with the form of a short story. It can deliver emotional cargo in a way I think a novel can't. A novel has to make adjustments for all its concerns, but when you're writing a story, you can be a total dictator. When I was done with The Orphan Master's Son, I just missed stories. I couldn't wait to go back to them. I had a year off and just wrote, and those stories just came out.

Were these stories meant to be part of a collection, or were they written at different points in time?

I have chronic concerns about dislocation, about people fitting in with the right people, a little bit of isolation. I'm always curious about a voice that I hear that I can't find more about. Then my chronic concerns latch onto something, and that's that. For that George Orwell story, it was some book tour in Germany and a TV station wanted to interview me. [They'd said] "We know you like torture, let's interview you in a torture place."

I love that one. What would you say is your favorite in this collection?

If I think about writing them rather than reading them, that's tough to say. A couple of them are more personal, like "Interesting Facts"and "Nirvana" are about issues that went on in our house. Though "Dark Meadow" [about a pedophile trying to do good] was probably the biggest high-wire act I've done. That was a pretty thrilling story to write; it filled me with a lot of anxiety and tension to fill this character with humanity. We bandy this notion about that every life matters, but do we really believe it?

I have to ask, have you ever felt pressure to live up to certain expectations after winning the Pulitzer?

I can understand that question. If someone was a little younger, you'd feel that pretty strongly. It was a really nice surprise, I didn't see it coming. But my wife and I sat down and we agreed this could change my life however we wanted. We took stock of our kids and ourselves and decided to pretend it never happened.

How is that working out?

I can't, because people remind me every day. [Laughs] I didn't go buy a Ferrari or anything. You've got to walk the dogs and pick up their poop—I mean, what really could change?

"I do see some writers, they want it all," Johnson says. "They win a big award, they want the next big award."

But aren't authors desperate for any exposure?

If i cared about that stuff, I would live in New York. You know, it's a great place and every time I'm there, I'm like, "New York's amazing." I don't read any reviews and you know the value of what's happening here is in the conversation you and I are having and not in its appearance online. I'll admit this is true: My publisher and my amazing editor believe in me and are investing in me, and if their efforts aren't rewarded, I'd feel really bad for them, because they believe in me a great deal. I just write my goofy things that come to me, and it's all about fighting the battle on the page. It was a little more scary when the kids were small and we couldn't afford the rent and the dentist, but the sensibility's the same.

I do see some writers, they want it all. They win a big award, they want the next big award. Teaching at Stanford, every year there's a new crop of people who are just fantastic. We've got to make way for them. Their books need attention.

One trend I've noticed among novels lately is the epic, sprawling narrative with several perspectives, like Anthony Doer's All the Light We Cannot See. What do you make of it?

I did read Tony Doer's book. He writes the most beautiful prose, he's a wonderful guy. I do abhor sentimentality. I don't think it's connected to multiple perspectives, personally. I think the enemy of the writer is the visual arts and cinema in that in narrative fiction, the great power that we have is that we can go inside the minds of our characters and that's much more different onscreen, mostly because of compressed time. They have to take shortcuts to convey narratives, and they're all a lie.

One of the great lies of cinema is that events and emotion collide. There will be a funeral and everyone's weeping and nodding, feeling the weight of grief. The truth is that during those large, bewildering life events, you might not understand them for years. What is it like to lose someone? You're not going to know for at least a year. It teaches everyone that this is how it works, but it's a lie. And that falls into the category of sentimentality—whenever the reader or viewer is asked to feel an emotion that the narrative hasn't earned. That should be avoided like the plague, because it's the one thing that our form is designed not to do. We have the space and the access to get the real thing.

With that in mind, where do you think literature is headed? And is fiction still relevant in the digital era?

The sonnet was once the great form, and it lasted 800 years. People found the way to make it speak about love and death and the universe and everything. In times of stability, I think we live with fixed forms. In times of change, we like experimentation, and we have been going through a century of change since World War I. More experimentation is going to come. It's the most without-rules form we have. There are no rules in the novel, that's what's definitive of it. More people can use it to express and to speak and include more people. We're going to see people build it up and destroy it in all sorts of ways. It's going to be a most useful tool if people employ it.

Jill Krasny Senior Writer Jill Krasny is a senior writer for Esquire where she covers lifestyle, books and general news.

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