Times of London: My Favorite Novel of 2010
TONY & SUSAN by Austin Wright is a masterful achievement in literature: Times Online
M.J.L.
Category: News
filed under: Being a Columnist—Chosun Ilbo
At the end of 2008, I was asked to contribute a monthly column to the Chosun Ilbo in their “Morning Forum” (“Ah-chim Nohn-dahn”). Founded in 1920, the Chosun Ilbo is the most influential newspaper of South Korea with a daily print circulation of 2.2 million readers and is the No. 1 source of Korean news on the internet. The Chosun Ilbo is publlished in Korean in print and on-line and in English only on-line. The rotating contributing columnists of the Morning Forum are scholars, politicians, economists and artists who weigh in on topics relating to Korea. Every six months, a new slate of 6 columnists are chosen by the Chosun Ilbo editorial board. Apparently, they wanted a Korean-American novelist to write about Korea on the topics of my choosing. My column would appear in the Korean Chosun Ilbo. Because my Korean language skills are poor, my columns would be written in English then translated into Korean by my editor Sunny Park.
Yes, I felt honored, but I was also anxious and doubtful, because I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I’d never been a columnist before. The high level of sophistication and difficulty of the Korean diction of the Chosun Ilbo made it impossible for me to read and study the column format without the help of a translator. And then, there were the politics. The Chosun Ilbo is viewed as an establishment paper and often considered conservative. I am not conservative. So, for the uninitiated, imagine the tone and quality of The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, the diction and scope of subject matter of The New York Times and the serious circulation of USA Today with some readers equating its political stance as more Fox News than The Daily Show. That said, no one in Korea dismisses the Chosun Ilbo, because of its history and imprimatur. Many of my favorite Korean writers had published first in the Chosun Ilbo. I expressed these anxieties to my editor. A brilliant and generous editor, Sunny did not blink.
So I wrote a column each month and submitted them. After I finished my first 6-month term, the editorial board asked me to stay on for another six months. After I finished my second term, they asked me to continue for a third term.
Recently, I had to put together a list of my columns, and I was surprised to see that I had written 15 already link.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve written about plastic surgery, how to choose a career, education, declining birth rate, rising suicide rate, mental therapy, and translating korean literature, among other things. Each month when I write my column, I worry myself sick for the obvious reasons: authority, accuracy, legitimacy, relevancy, and you bet, the on-line comment box where readers get to tell me what they really think of my theories about South Korea’s place in the world.
As I reach the middle of my third, and I think, my final term, I continue to tie myself in knots about what I should write, but I am also finally beginning to see how cool it is to study and write about my birthplace from the vantage point of having grown up and been educated in the United States. This is a privilege indeed, and I am grateful to have a say.
Erica Wagner, Literary Editor Of The Times Of London—"Great Novel? You Must Be Having A Laugh”
“Answer this question: what kind of books do you like to read?”
FFFM made Erica Wagner’s Top Ten List of Comic Novels.
Great Novel? You Must Be Having A Laugh
Erica Wagner is the Literary Editor of The TIMES of London. She is author of a collection of short stories Gravity (Granta), Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath And The Story Of Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber; W.W. Norton) and the novel Seizure (Faber & Faber).
The Wall Street Journal—January 29, 2010: My Korean New Year:
This essay and video appeared in the WSJ WEEKEND JOURNAL—ASIA on January 29, 2010. It was the cover story. The essay was edited by S. Karene Witcher and the recipe by Nellie Huang. The video was shot by Makiko Segawa and edited by Lam Thuy Vo. Photographs by Alfie Goodrich.
Korean New Year will begin on February 14, 2010. Have a good one!
Forthcoming Publications 2010
The essay “Money as an American Character and the Legacy of Permission: Or How Mark Twain Taught Me That It Was Okay to Talk About Money” will appear in THE MARK TWAIN ANTHOLOGY: Great Writers on His Life and Works (The Library of America) edited by the Mark Twain scholar and Director of American Studies at Stanford University, Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin. The anthology includes essays by Jorge Luis Borges, Erica Jong, George Orwell, T.S. Eliott, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Robert Penn Warren, Kenzaburo Oe, Gore Vidal and Roy Blount, Jr. among others.
A 25 word work of fiction will appear in HINT FICTION (W.W. Norton & Co.) edited by Robert Swartwood. The term “hint fiction” was coined by Robert Swartwood.
Vogue Essays
I wrote these personal essays for Vogue a while back, but haven’t had a chance to post them till now. “Weighing In” was in the UP FRONT column and “Crowning Glory” was in VIEW. Both essays were edited by the brilliant Senior Editor, Abigail Walch.
July is really here. Unbelievable. I hope you are having a good summer.
M.J.L.
Wall Street Journal- Asia, April 3, 2009
When I was in Hong Kong for the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, I was interviewed by the journalist Saul Sugarman who is also on the staff of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Link » Wall Street Journal Asia
South China Morning Post - March 1, 2009
A profile of my work appeared in the Post – the English-language paper of Hong Kong. It was written by Melinda Harper. I recently visited Hong Kong for its Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, and it was a beautiful place.
YONHAP NEWS AGENCY: “Top 10 Bestsellers in South Korea’s Foreign Fiction List”
A profile of my work appeared on March 8, 2009 in the Yonhap News—South Korea’s official news agency. I was interviewed by the journalist Shin Hae-in of Yonhap.
The interview begins…
“She was once cast in with that sea of would-be authors, struggling to find a publisher for her debut novel: a lengthy, dense work full of complex characters that might intimidate even the most voracious reader.Now, people call her the “21st century Jane Austen,” and Lee Min-jin has become one of the few Korean-American writers to have their book translated into the language of their parents.”
M.J.L.
Click here to read the article.
This version of the Yonhap story ran in the Joongang Ilbo—the Korean partner paper of the International Herald Tribune: Joongang Ilbo.
Italian Translation Release
FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES is titled AMORI E PREGIUDIZIO in Italian and has been released by the publisher EINAUDI.
How do you say “Hooray!” in Italian?
M.J.L.
WORLD MAGAZINE: Best-Selling Books with Christian Themes
“This big, realistic novel centers on a set of young Korean-Americans working in New York’s financial industry in the 1990s, and their parents. Protagonist Casey is a recent Princeton grad who is aimless, alienated from her family, and deeply in credit card debt. Though Casey and the other well-developed characters seek fulfillment in work, status, attainment, and sex—there’s a lot of it, and bad language—those things don’t satisfy. Because she’s writing about Korean-American culture in which the church has a central role, most of Min Jin Lee’s characters are wrestling with God in some way. That makes this book different: How many novels grounded in New York City reality even acknowledge that God is worth thinking about?” —Susan Olasky
Chosun Ilbo: Morning Forum
I am serving as one of the columnists for “The Morning Forum” of The Chosun Ilbo Daily. The first of the six essays appeared today. It was translated by Sunny Park, senior writer of The Chosun Ilbo Daily.
The English version of the essay appears here:
A Good Question: How Could I Quit Being a Lawyer?
The Korean version of the essay appears here:
왜 변호사를 그만두셨어요?
You can also download the Korean version in pdf format:
[min081120.pdf]
Family Time
I was recently interviewed by the writer Julie Wilson for the magazine Tokyo Families. An essay appears in the forthcoming anthology ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY (Riverhead, February 2009), edited by the brilliant Rebecca Walker. The anthology was recently praised in Publishers Weekly. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY includes contributors Jenny Block, Antonio Caya, Dawn Friedman, Suzanne Kamata, Susan McKinney Ortega, Liza Monroy, ZZ Packer, and Dan Savage.
Largehearted Boy’s “Why Obama”
This essay appears in the anthology Why I’m a Democrat (PoliPoint Press) which was edited by Susan Mulcahy. The proceeds of this book benefit survivors of the Katrina Hurricane. Contributors include: Frank McCourt, Jonathan Franzen, Isaac Mizrahi, Tama Janowitz, Maira Kalmon, Tony Bennett and Melissa Etheridge. Incidentally, I am a huge fan of David Gutkowski of Largeheartedboy.com, because indeed, his heart is enormous.
TATLER, July 2008
“Discussing the tenuous relationship between first generation immigrant parents and their hip young offspring, this debut novel is sympathetic without being saccharine and constitutes a fantastic portrait of intergenerational cultural friction” – TATLER (Ireland) 2008
(Review of FFFM for the UK paperback -Hutchinson-Random House)
