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.
It is my hope that every month or so, I will post1 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).
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
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Min Jin Lee is the author of Free Food for Millionaires, published by Warner Books May, 2007
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