Min Jin Lee

Lee's short story "Axis of Happiness" won the 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine.[15]

Another short story by Lee, "Motherland", about a family of Koreans in Japan, was published in The Missouri Review in 2002 and won the Peden Prize for Best Short Story.[16] A slightly modified version of the story appears in her 2017 novel Pachinko.[17]

Lee's short stories have also been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts.[18]

Her debut novel Free Food for Millionaires was published in 2007.[19][20] It was named one of the Top 10 Novels of the Year by The Times of London,[21] NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today; a notable novel by the San Francisco Chronicle;[22] and a New York Times Editor's Choice.[23] It was a selection for the Wall Street Journal Juggler Book Club,[24] and a No. 1 Book Sense pick. The novel was published in the U.K. by Random House in 2007, in Italy by Einaudi and in South Korea by Image Box Publishing. The book has also been featured on online periodicals such as the Page 99 test[25] and Largehearted Boy.[26]

A 10th Anniversary edition of the novel was released by Apollo in 2017.[27] It was announced in January 2021 that Lee and screenwriter Alan Yang had teamed up to bring Free Food for Millionaires to Netflix as a TV series.[20][19]

In 2017 Lee released Pachinko, an epic historical novel following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. The book received strong reviews including those from The Guardian,[28] NPR,[29] The New York Times,[30] The Sydney Morning Herald,[31] The Irish Times,[32] and Kirkus Reviews[33] and is on the "Best Fiction of 2017" lists from Esquire,[34] the Chicago Review of Books,[35] Amazon.com,[36] Entertainment Weekly, the BBC,[37] The Guardian,[38] and Book Riot.[39] The book was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.[40]

In a Washington Post interview, writer Roxane Gay called Pachinko her favorite book of 2017.[41] President Barack Obama recommended Pachinko in May 2019, writing that Lee's novel is "a powerful story about resilience and compassion."[42]

Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.[43] In August 2018, it was announced that Apple Inc. had obtained the screen rights to the novel for development as a television series for Apple TV+.[44] The series, consisting of eight episodes, premiered in March 2022.[45]

As of 2023, Pachinko has been published in over 35 languages.[46]

In 2023, Lee was chosen as the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories, an anthology of the best 20 short stories in fiction published the previous year.[47]

Free Food for Millionaires:

• The Times [48]
• NPR’s Fresh Air [49]
• USA Today [50]

Pachinko:

• The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017 [51]
• Book of the Year for BBC[52]
• New York Public Library[53]
• "Now Read This," the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and The New York Times[54][55]
• CNN[56]
• NPR[57]
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation[58]
• USA Today [59]

Lee has written a number of reviews. In 2012 she wrote a review of Toni Morrison's Home in The Times of London,[60] and also a review in the Times of London of March Was Made of Yarn, edited by David Karashima and Elmer Luke, a collection of essays, stories, poems and manga made by Japanese artists and citizens in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.[61] She also wrote Times of London reviews of Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies[62] and Jodi Picoult's Wonder Woman: Love and Murder.[63]

In her interview with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lee reveals that part of her intention with her writing is to create a sense of directed thinking out of chaos and develop some form of a unified order. [64]

In March 2023, the Association of Writers & Writing Program (AWP) invited Lee as the 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair Keynote Speaker.[65] The Writer’s Chronicle published Lee’s fire chat conversation with librarian Nancy Pearl in Volume 56, September 2023.[66]

PBS released an Arts Talk conversation between Lee and Ann Curry in July 2023, where they discussed Lee’s artistic process, religion, and her tenacity in the fight against Asian hate.[67]

The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) released a documentary in August 2023 on Lee that covered biographical details and the inspiration for Pachinko. [68]

Her essays include "Will", anthologized in Breeder – Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers (Seal Press Books, 2001) and "Pushing Away the Plate" in To Be Real (edited by Rebecca Walker) (Doubleday, 1995). Lee also published a piece in the New York Times Magazine entitled "Low Tide", about her observations of the survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.[69] She wrote another essay entitled Up Front: After the Earthquake in Vogue, reflecting upon her experiences living in Japan with her family after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.[70] Lee has also written two other essays in Vogue, including Weighing In (2008) and Crowning Glory (2007).

An essay entitled "Reading the World" that Lee wrote appears in the March 26, 2010, issue of Travel + Leisure.[71] She also wrote an article profiling the cuisine and work of Tokyo chef Seiji Yamamoto in Food & Wine.[72] She has also written a piece for the Barnes & Noble review entitled Sex, Debt, and Revenge: Balzac’s Cousin Bette.[73]

Her interviews and essays have also been profiled in online periodicals such as Chekhov's Mistress ("My Other Village: Middlemarch by George Eliot"),[74] Moleskinerie ("Pay Yourself First"),[75] and ABC News ("Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller").[76]

Other essays by Lee have been anthologized in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, Why I'm a Democrat (Ed. Susan Mulcahy), One Big Happy Family, Sugar in My Bowl and Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time.

When Lee was a Fiction Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she gave the 2018–2019 Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities.[77] Her talk was titled Are Koreans Human?, which touched on writing her new novel and writing about the Korean diaspora.[78]

In September 2019, Lee gave Amherst College's annual DeMott lecture, a welcome address for incoming students.[79] The DeMott Lecture seeks "to expose incoming students to an engagement with the world marked by originality of thought coupled with direct social action, and to inspire intellectual participation in issues of social and economic inequality, racial and gender bias, and political activism."[80]

• The Best Girls (2004/2019) – Originally published in 2004, was re-issued in 2019 as a part of Amazon's Disorder Series
• Axis of Happiness (2004) – 2004 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine[15]
• Motherland (2002) – William Peden Prize for Best Short Story, The Missouri Review[16]

• Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Grand Central Publishing, ISBN 978-0-446-58108-0.[81]
• Pachinko (2017), Grand Central Publishing, ISBN 978-1-455-56393-7 [82]

• The Best American Short Stories (2023), Mariner Books, ISBN 978-0-063-27590-4.[83]