Copies of the UK paperback are sold at the newsstand at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. Now, I’ve never been to Hong Kong, but I thought it was good that the book is resting in such fancy digs.
M.J.L.
Newsweek: 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.
Min Jin Lee: 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 “Forget the Comparisons, She’s Unique” at Newsweek
]]>(Review of FFFM for the UK paperback -Hutchinson-Random House)
]]>Copies of the UK paperback are sold at the newsstand at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. Now, I’ve never been to Hong Kong, but I thought it was good that the book is resting in such fancy digs.
M.J.L.
Unexpected and fun news:
In May, Free Food For Millionaires was No. 8 on the Fiction Bestseller list in Malaysia.
I hope your summer is terrific.
M.J.L.
Wonder Woman: Love and Murder by Jodi Picoult
Min Jin Lee on Leaders, Good Girls and the Discomforts of Wealth
]]>“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.
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.
]]>“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.
]]>‘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
]]>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
]]>“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.”
“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. “
]]>“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.”
]]>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.