Min Jin Lee

News

A review of Toni Morrison’s new book HOME in THE TIMES OF LONDON

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/fiction/article3386800.ece

News

An essay on interracial love, forthcoming in THE GLOBAL and the INTIMATE (Columbia University Press)

THE GLOBAL AND THE INTIMATE: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia University Press April 2012)

Edited by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, Contributors include Jamaica Kincaid, Marianne Hirsch, Nancy K. Miller and Sidonie Smith.

"What We Women Talk About When We Talk About Interracial Love" by Min Jin Lee

News

The New Yorker Writes up the Talk I was part of with Erica Jong and Daphne Merkin

Samantha Henig begins her piece with: 

"What do women want? What’s the deal with Anthony Weiner? How do you know that a Jewish woman has had an orgasm? Those were the lunchtime topics of conversation at the Bryant Park Reading Room on Wednesday, in an event led by Erica Jong, Min Jin Lee, and Daphne Merkin, all of whom contributed to Jong’s new anthology, “Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex.” They discussed and read from their pieces (a reversal of that order might have been preferred), which deal with themes of, for Merkin, sex and ownership; for Lee, sex and stereotypes; and for Jong, not surprisingly, straight-up sex."

Read more at The New Yorker

News

Reading: Erica Jong and Contributors Daphne Merkin, Min Jin Lee and Susan Kinsolving

When: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:30 pm 
Where: Bryant Park Reading Room
42nd St and 5th Ave
(212) 768-4242

Hear from the author who brought you FEAR OF FLYING, whose latest compilation of essays by contributors like Gail Collins, Liz Smith, and Min Jin Lee, tackle the ever so elusive question: What do women really want?  In the free, unfettered spirit of THE BITCH IN THE HOUSE, SUGAR IN MY BOWL explores the bedroom lives of women with daring, wit, intelligence, and candor.

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TRAVEL and LEISURE November 2010

 An essay of Cheju Island of South Korea appears in this month's TRAVEL + LEISURE. I went there as college girl then returned recently as a grown up. It had aged beautifully. I hope to return soon. —MJL

News

NORTON HINT FICTION ANTHOLOGY

HINT FICTION: Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (W.W. Norton 2010) is out. It was edited by Robert    Swartwood who coined the term "Hint fiction."—MJL

Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Ha Jin, Max Barry, Don Lee, Tess Gerritsen, Benjamin Percy, Rachel Lopez, Eric Hsu, Stephen Dunn, James Frey, L.R. Bonehill, Christoffer Molnar, Nick Arvin and me.

Reviewed by Ian Crouch in The New Yorker. 

News

“When We Fell In Love”

A brief essay appears in the column "When We Fell  In Love" in  THREE GUYS ONE BOOK.  Thanks to my editor, David Haritou.—MJL

News

Fall 2010 Narrative Magazine

The wonderful Narrative Magazine has published, in their fall 2010 issue, a video of me reading from Free Food for Millionaires. 

To view the video, click [here].

News

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.

News

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).

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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.

News

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.

Click here to download Crowning_Glory.pdf
Click here to download Weighing_In.pdf

News

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

Personal

American School In Japan

I recently spoke to the enthusiastic Classes of 2009 and 2010 at ASIJ about being a writer and visited Ms. Karen Noll’s AP English seminars. The seminar students were reading Mrs. Dalloway (I read this in my early 30s), and they were an impressive group. Later, I spoke with two lower school students about how writers make a living. I hope I wasn’t too sobering an influence. The best part was spending the day with my favorite librarian Lin Hayakawa and cataloguer extraordinaire Kirby Yoshii who have been friends since they were girls in Connecticut and now work together in a library in Tokyo.
M.J.L.

Reviews & Comments

“Bodies” By Susie Orbach, The Times Of London

This new book by Susie Orbach is a must-read-please. It will be out in the States in March. I think her work is unequivocally brilliant and important.

My review in The Times of London