Photo credit: KERRY RAFTIS, KEYSHOTS.COM.
In the nationally bestselling debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing, available in paperback April 2008), you'll discover that 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 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 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, author Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.
Min Jin Lee was awarded the Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the Veech Prize for Fiction at Yale College where she studied History. She attended Georgetown Law School and worked as a lawyer for several years prior to writing full time. She 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 is a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a national bestseller; it was a Top 10 Novels of the Year for The 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, PACHINKO.
From the New York Times Book Review (Liesl Schillinger, July 1):
"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."
