Adam Johnson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for “The Orphan Master’s Son,” had an ideal upbringing for a writer. His father was a night watchman at the Phoenix Zoo and he would bring young Adam along on his evening rounds.  “My father showed me there was a zoo that average people saw, but at night, with all the keys in hand, he would lift the veil and show me the real zoo,” he said. “Animals had certain behaviors in their exhibits, I learned, but at night, in their private enclosures, they displayed their true personalities. The zoo taught me there was always a hidden, purer world, and this is the only part of life I’m interested in depicting in my work.”  His fertile childhood preparation for fiction writing continued when he came home from school one day at age eight and learned that his parents were getting divorced. They sat him down on his bed, he recalls, the only piece of furniture not yet packed, and “they both told me how much they loved me.” He said he learned at an early age “when somebody tells you how much they love you, you know you are f—ed.”  Now 48 and happily married with children, he has a string of literary prizes and a prestigious teaching gig at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program. But the pain and bewilderment from his parents’ divorce still seems close to the surface. In one story in “Fortune Smiles,” his new collection out later this month, Mr. Johnson writes about a UPS driver in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, trying to come to terms with caring for his infant son amid trying circumstances. The story ends ambiguously but child abandonment is definitely a possibility. “I’ve wondered my whole life how it was that my father could leave the family he started,” Mr. Johnson said about the story’s ending.  Mr. Johnson saw his father last year but isn’t in touch with him regularly. “Both of his email accounts are dead and his phone no longer works,” Mr. Johnson said. “I currently don’t have a contact for him. I wish I did.”  While the darkness is never far from the surface, the stories also bubble with wicked humor and invention. Mr. Johnson has a gift for making imaginary things seem very real. In “Nirvana,” the first story in the collection, a character invents the iProjector, a three-dimensional holograph that lets grieving citizens interact with a recently assassinated president. It’s based on “an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video complier.” After the story was published in Esquire, Popular Mechanics asked an artificial-intelligence expert to access the fictional invention and found it viable.  In college, Mr. Johnson studied journalism and is still a prodigious researcher. Before writing “The Orphan Master’s Son,” he spent six years researching North Korea, where the novel takes place. For the story set in New Orleans, he spent days several days delivering packages with UPS drivers, even donning one of the company’s brown uniforms, a size double extra-large for Mr. Johnson, who is 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 280 pounds. One sweltering day, he helped deliver more than 300 packages.  One story in the new collection is about a woman with cancer. Mr. Johnson’s wife, who is now “very healthy” he said, had breast cancer and a double mastectomy. Although writing it was “kind of a violation of our family,” Mr. Johnson said, when Harper’s published the story this year, it sparked more response than anything else he has written. In the short-story collection, he also returns to the weird world of North Korea.  In one story, a woman eases her pain by listening to Kurt Cobain. Will Taylor Swift ever make it into one of your stories?  A couple years ago, my old college roommate took his life. I wasn’t really able to process it because my wife was going through chemotherapy at the time. But I remembered that my friend’s favorite band was Nirvana—it had been on all the time in our apartment—and while I couldn’t quite give my full attention to his loss, I found myself going back to that music. Resurrecting Kurt Cobain turned out to be very therapeutic for me, and of course fiction is the main way my mind figures things out.  It’s appropriate that Cobain gets a starring role in the first story: The pain expressed in the stories is almost unendurable. What is your approach to writing about emotionally painful situations?  What’s always seemed incomprehensible to me are life’s emotional absurdities. People seem shocked that I might write about Kim Jong-il [the former dictator of North Korea], for example, and yet we take for granted the everyday pain around us. We accept as a matter of fact that half of all marriages fail, that children must choose to live with one parent or another or that the essential human need of love seems elusive for so many who wander alone.  There’s an incredibly vivid image in “The Orphan Master’s Son”: A sailor cuts off the fin of a shark (for shark fin soup, a delicacy in Asia) “and then rolled the shark back into the water, where, unable to maneuver, it would race nowhere but down, disappearing into the blackness, leaving only a thin contrail of blood behind.”  The North Koreans are involved in every criminal enterprise on earth that will generate foreign currency and this includes shark finning. If you watch a YouTube video of the practice, my depiction will seem a fairly journalistic one. I elevated the language a bit because of all the horror it generates in me. Which raises the eternal question of whether darkness deserves lyrical expression.  Do you recall writing that passage and where that image sprang from?  I’m pretty obsessive about my language, and I don’t let go of a line until I’m satisfied.  Probably the equivalent of a shark that can’t maneuver would be a human that couldn’t communicate. That’s probably our biggest nightmare, being “locked in”—in possession of one’s full faculties but without the ability to express them.  How autobiographical is your earlier story “Your Own Backyard”? Were you a rough kid?  Just the opposite—I was a thoughtful, sensitive boy. After my parents split, I spent many hours by myself. I had this obsession of wandering the alleys in my neighborhood and opening all the trash dumpsters. I would stare at the things families threw away, trying to figure out what a family was and what made them tick.  In real life, my father was remote and elusive. Instead of exploring that, which I knew all too well, I turned the tables fictionally with “Your Own Backyard” and studied a portrait of a father who would do anything to be close to his son.  Is research an underrated tool for fiction writers?  I was trained as a journalist and though I wasn’t a very good one when I was young, I’ve always loved research and especially interviewing. Coming into possession of real human stories is very important for me, whether it’s a hurricane survivor or North Korean defector. For me, the emotionality of real experiences becomes the test of what my depictions must then achieve.  Is imagination an underrated tool for fiction writers?  You’ve got to write the book you want to read, as they say. I’ve always been interested in fiction that delivers new worlds, and building them is one of the great pleasures I take from writing.  One of the great moments in “Fortune Smiles” is when the North Korean defectors confront “Seoul’s bewildering nature.”  Seoul is simply the future of America; they’re just four to five years ahead of us in terms of how technology penetrates and alters culture. I feel like a dinosaur there, and I work in Silicon Valley. So imagine how North Koreans feel after they defect.
Author Adam Johnson peers into the future and makes imagined inventions seem ordinary in his new short-story collection, ‘Fortune Smiles.’