PAPERBACK TOUR & VOGUE (April 2008)
The U.S. paperback of FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES will be released on April 9th. It has a new cover designed by the talented art director Anne Twomey of Grand Central, and copies should be at bookstores near you presently. There’s a new essay in VOGUE this month (April 2008) titled “Weighing In” in its Up Front column. I’ll be in the States starting the 9th for the nationwide paperback tour. I hope you’ll swing by the events and say hello. I look forward to seeing you, and thank you for your kind support.
M.J.L.
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News
A Book Review in The Times (London) and a Q&A on Wall Street Journal.Com
I recently had the opportunity to write an essay about WONDER WOMAN for The TIMES (London) which was great fun, and it made the cover.
Free Food For Millionaires was a selection for the Wall Street Journal JUGGLE Book Club, and there is a Q&A with the reporter Sara Schaefer-Munoz. I thought Schaefer-Munoz’s four essays on the book were marvelous and thought-provoking.
Wonder Woman: Love and Murder by Jodi Picoult
Min Jin Lee on Leaders, Good Girls and the Discomforts of Wealth
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News
THE YEAR END LISTS
The book has been included in the following year end lists. My profound thanks to all, and I wish you a happy new year.
“Top 10 Books of 2007” – USA TODAY
“Year’s Best Books” – NPR’s FRESH AIR
“Editor’s Fiction Favorites for 2007” – THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW
“Best Recommended List” – CRITICAL MASS, THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS’ CIRCLE
“Favorite Fiction of 2007” – CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“Favorite Books of the Year” – CHICAGO SUN TIMES
“Auspicious Debut” – 2007 BOOK SENSE PICK HIGHLIGHTS
“Auspicious Debut” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Notable Books of 2007” – SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Best Novels of the Year” and “THE TIMES Christmas Choice” – THE TIMES (London)
“Favorite Novels of 2007” – LARGEHEARTEDBOY.COM
Wonderful Book Club News:
FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES is a selection of the Juggle Book Club of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
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News
The Greetings of the Season
My family and I moved to Tokyo in late August, and three months have raced by. Boxes remain unpacked, but everyone is settling in. Already, we’ve had two sets of wonderful houseguests, and we prepare for dear friends to arrive at the end of the month to help celebrate our first Christmas in Japan. As for the writing life, there was a personal essay in VOGUE in November about millinery and my father. Essays are forthcoming in the 2008 anthologies, WALK THIS WAY (ed. Rebecca Walker) about the new American family and WHY I’M A DEMOCRAT (ed. Susan Mulcahy)—a benefit collection for Katrina victims.
Happy news: In the States, FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES was included in the year-end round up for best fiction of 2007 in THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW and in the inaugural Best Recommended List of CRITICAL MASS, the website of THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS’ CIRCLE, and was a Favorite Books of 2007 in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. It was a Notable Book of 2007 in the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. On NPR’s FRESH AIR, it was included in book critic Maureen Corrigan’s list of eight best novels of the year. It was an Auspicious Debut in the 2007 BOOK SENSE PICK HIGHLIGHTS and in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. In the UK, the book was selected by THE TIMES (London) as one of the ten best novels of the year and is a Christmas Choice.
The book in translation will be released in South Korea (Magellan) and Italy (Einaudi) presently. The paperback will be released in the United States in April 2008.
I hope this note finds you and your loved ones very well in the holiday season.
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News
Maureen Corrigan reviews Free Food For Millionaires on NPR’s FRESH AIR
Reviewing Free Food for Millionaires for NPR, Maureen Corrigan says:
“I read a terrific debut novel this week. It’s always heartening to find a good new writer, but what’s especially delightful about Min Jin Lee and her new novel, called Free Food for Millionaires, is that she’s taken up the expansive form of the nineteenth century novel and its concerns about money, marriage, and duty, to create a kind of Korean-American riff on all those sagas, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, where the principled heroine sometimes behaves like a downright fool.”
Follow this link to the NPR Website to listen to the podcast.
Newsweek Interview
Charlene Dy’s interview for Newsweek. Here’s an excerpt:
‘Free Food for Millionaires’ was about so much more than just wealth and class.
It’s about love.
But there was so much adultery in the book! Everyone was sleeping around and breaking up with each other. It’s sort of a dim view of love.
Love is an absolutely tantalizing, beautiful thing. And yet, it is profoundly disappointing, too. I think adultery is a wonderful metaphor of betrayal. Sex is this intimate act between two people. In its highest form, we believe that it’s to be held sacred between two people who love each other. And that’s the reason why adultery always wounds us so much. But, if you take that as a metaphor, you can have adultery in friendship, you can have adultery in any intimate relationship.
Read the entire interview at: Newsweek.com
Free Food for Millionaires Reviewed in New York Times Book Review
Liesl Schillinger, reviews Free Food for Millionaires in the New York Times Book Review (“Korean War” July 1, 2007).
I am grateful for Schillinger’s intelligent essay. She begins:
“In Korean tradition, there’s a complicated emotion called han which, by general consensus, applies chiefly to women. A recently published Korean commonplace book defines it as ‘resentment, sorrow, sense of loss and hardship, stifled passion and love, or the frustration of the downtrodden.’ A woman who manages to overcome these obstacles is said to have “resolved her han.” In 21st-century American terms, this is what Oprah would call ‘living your best life.’
In her accomplished and engrossing first novel, the Yale-and-Georgetown-law-educated writer Min Jin Lee tells the story of an angry young Korean-American woman, raised by status-conscious immigrant parents in Queens, who falls out with them after she graduates from Princeton. Not only does this heroine harbor han, she embodies it — her name is Casey Han.”
Schillinger continues:
“In their differing temperaments, Casey and Ella recall the seesaw sisters in ‘Middlemarch’ or ‘Pride and Prejudice’ — foolishly idealistic Dorothea versus sensible Celia; headstrong Lizzy Bennet versus amiable Jane. But the men in their lives aren’t as tidily classifiable as Casaubon, Chettam, Darcy or Bingley. Nor is marriage the girls’ primary goal. Like the author herself, Casey and Ella are modern women whose definition of happiness includes career satisfaction and personal fulfillment — both of which can be harder to secure than a man with a ring.”
Another generous quotation:
“It would be remarkable if she had simply written a long novel that was as easy to devour as a 19th-century romance — packed with tales of flouted parental expectations, fluctuating female friendships and rivalries, ephemeral (and longer-lasting) romantic hopes and losses, and high-stakes career gambles. But Lee intensifies her drama by setting it against an unfamiliar backdrop: the tightly knit social world of Korean immigrants, whose children strive to blend into their American foreground without clashing with their distinctive background. It’s a feat of coordination and contrast that could kill a chameleon, but Lee pulls it off with conviction.”
Read the entire review at the New York Times
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News
An Essay on Biblical Illiteracy on ABC News.com
I was recently asked to write an essay on Biblical Illiteracy by ABCNEWS.com:
“Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller: Writers Often Agree That the Bible Is a Good Book” for ABC News. It begins:
“There has been a great deal of froth lately about how “God Is Not Great” and how religions have made a rot of peace. The argument is fizzy yet hardly new: The world is a mess, and it has become so through those who believe in God. Well, fine.
No doubt God can take this notion on the chin and move on if He is indeed God. If there is a God, and for me, a confirmed Presbyterian, there is one, He isn’t losing sleep over these polemics.”
click here to read the rest
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Personal
Free Food for Millionaires Reviewed in Narrative Magazine
Free Food for Millionaires was Reviewed by Lacy Crawford in Narrative Magazine in the First and Second Looks section (requires registration). Here’s an excerpt:
“Not one character is introduced in this wide-ranging novel who doesn’t come alive and fill the stage, for a page or entire chapters; the effect is of a choir gradually assembling, so that by the end of this big, lush novel, the reader feels a community gathered—one that provides the most hopeful alternative to the harsh old ways and the even harsher new. This novel will make readers, particularly young urbanites, misty with recognition. “
Interview at “Living Read Girl”
“Living Read Girl” :
“Question: Free Food for Millionaires is structured like a 19th Century novel. What is it about that style of writing that appeals to you?”
“Answer: …By comparison, I take comfort in the rules of a sonnet—the number of lines, the kinds of rhyme, the type of sonnets (Petrachan, Spenserian…) and the infinite variety of poems that can be written within the narrow rules of a form. I have studied the techniques of traditional story telling in the hopes of making the story almost easy to read. I worry obsessively about technique and tools and demand a great deal from each placement and change of word or idea, but I think when a reader picks up my book, she should never have to think about any of this.”
“Living Read Girl” on Free Food For Millionaires
Living Read Girl has this to say about Free Food For Millionaires:
This is Min Jin Lee’s first novel and I have to say, this doesn’t read like one at all. FFFM reads more like the work of a seasoned pro at the top of her game. If you’re looking for a smart, clever and engaging novel,Free Food For Millionaires is your Golden Ticket, folks.
A Poem by Wallace Stevens
It is my hope that every month or so, I will post a poem I admire.
This one is by Wallace Stevens, and it has been a consolation to me at different moments in my life.
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Light the first light of evening
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
1 I have done this without permission, and I apologize to his estate. If the estate objects, I’d be happy to remove it from the site. My original thinking about the blog was that if anyone had gone through the trouble of looking at the site and stumbled across this work, perhaps he or she might like this, too. Perhaps, dear reader, you would consider getting a copy of it at your favorite bookshop. The edition I like is: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America).
filed under:
Reading
The Bellow-Roth Equation
Michael Scharf writing about Free Food for Millionaires in Publisher’s Weekly:
Lee’s book is actually a lot more ambitious than Goodbye, Columbus (1959). The protagonist is a Korean-American woman named Casey Han, who is the Ivy-educated, “unusually tall” first daughter of a Queens emigré couple, husband-and-wife managers of a Manhattan dry cleaning franchise. (Managers, not owners. One of the things that’s so impressive about the book is the deft detail it goes into on such matters as how Korean owners of dry cleaning concerns hook, and keep, such couples as the Hans—down to the differences in pay between husband and wife, and how much of that money is kept on and off the books.) The book focuses on Casey’s post-collegiate path in the wake of being disowned, but its scope is kaleidoscopic, and its scale is (as also promised on the back cover) very 19th century, with Lee flashing in and out of the heads of a very large cast.
Read the rest at Publisher’s Weekly
