Min Jin Lee

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning first-time novelist MIN JIN LEE as she reads from Free Food for Millionaires.

"Competence can be a curse." So begins Min Jin Lee's debut novel about class, society, and identity. Casey Han's four years at Princeton have given her many things: "a refined ... (more)diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic's closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics. But no job and a number of bad habits."

Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold onto their culture and identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into the upper echelon of rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey's trust-fund friends see only opportunity and choices while Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As Casey navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives of those around her: her sheltered mother, scarred father, her friend Ella who's always been the good Korean girl, Ella's ambitious Korean husband and his Caucasian mistress, Casey's white fiancé, and then her Korean boyfriend, all culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots.

"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.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR FRESH AIR

Debut novelist, Min Jin Lee will be at Warwick's on Monday, April 28 at 7:30pm to discuss and sign her novel, Free Food For Millionaires, brand new in paperback. Casey Han's four years at Princeton gave her many things, 'But no job and a number of bad habits.' Casey's parents, who live in Queens, are ... (more)Korean immigrants working in a dry cleaner, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. Free Food For Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.For more, please visit Min Jin Lee.com Min Jin Lee has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and her essays have appeared in The Times(London), Vogue and in the anthologies To Be Real
and Breeder. Her debut novel Free Food For Millionaires was a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, a new York Times Editor’s Choice, a Wall Street Journal Juggle Book Club selection, and a national bestseller; it was a Top 10 Novels of the Year for Times (London), NPR’s Fresh Air and USA Today. She lives in Tokyo with her husband and son where she is working on her second novel.

"Casey Han’s four years at Princeton gave her many things, “but no job and a number of bad habits.” Casey’s parents are Korean immigrants working as dry cleaners, desperately trying to hold on to their culture and their identity. Their daughter, on the other hand, has entered into rarified American ... (more)society via scholarships. But after graduation, Casey sees the reality of having expensive habits without the means to sustain them. As she navigates Manhattan, we see her life and the lives around her, culminating in a compelling portrait of New York City and its world of haves and have-nots. Min Jin Lee went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She then attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time." (booksite.com)