Russ Franklin w/ Adam Johnson

Cosmic Hotel is Russ Franklin’s quirky yet touching novel that follows Sandeep Sanghavi, the son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous eccentric astronomer named Van Ray. Sandeep lives a nomadic life staying at different hotels across America with his mother and her hotel consulting firm. After not seeing them for many years, Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant astronaut ex-wife in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives. Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business, and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades.

Russ Franklin has degrees in math, physics, and literature, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, as well as a Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review,Greensboro Review and other publications. He currently teaches writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Adam Johnson is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son and the National Book Award winning short story collection Fortune Smiles . He teaches creative writing at Stanford University. 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. He lives in San Francisco.