Pachinko

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times '100 Best Books of the Century.' Lee is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. From South Korea, Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Lee served as the Editor of Best American Short Stories 2023. Lee’s essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She is at work on her third novel, American Hagwon, and a non-fiction work, Name Recognition.

Stunning... Pachinko is about outsiders, minorities and the politically disenfranchised. But it is so much more besides. Each time the novel seems to find its locus – Japan's colonization of Korea, World War II as experienced in East Asia, Christianity, family, love, the changing role of women – it becomes something else. It becomes even more than it was'