Min Jin Lee's Blog

TONY & SUSAN by Austin Wright is a masterful achievement in literature: Times Online

M.J.L.

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, ...

"Answer this question: what kind of books do you like to read?"

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).

download pdf This essay and video appeared in the WSJ WEEKEND JOURNAL—ASIA on January 29, 2010. It was the cover story. The essay was edited by S. Karene Witcher and the recipe by Nellie Huang. The video was shot by Makiko Segawa and edited by Lam Thuy Vo. Photographs by Alfie Goodrich.

Korean New Year will begin on February 14, 2010. Have a good one!

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...

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

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

An essay on my complicated travel issues appears in the April 2009 TRAVEL + LEISURE (Southeast Asia). It was surprisingly funny to brood on my curious anxieties about leaving the house. In the process of writing this essay, I figured out that I love the learning and seeing bits of travel even more than my consuming fear of the unknown.

My T+L editors were Chris Kucway, Paul Ehrlich & Matt Leppard.

Click here to download article

A profile of my work appeared in the Post – the English-language paper of Hong Kong. It was written by Melinda Harper. I recently visited Hong Kong for its Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, and it was a beautiful place.

Click here to download

A profile of my work appeared on March 8, 2009 in the Yonhap News—South Korea's official news agency. I was interviewed by the journalist Shin Hae-in of Yonhap.

The interview begins…

"She was once cast in with that sea of would-be authors, struggling to find a publisher for her debut novel: a lengthy, dense work full of complex characters that might intimidate even the most voracious reader.

Now, people call her the "21st century Jane Austen," and Lee Min-jin has become one of the few...