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Biographical Note: "American Hagwon is astonishing in its ability to do so many things at once. It is an enthralling family saga rich with intrigue, secrets, and betrayal. It is a literary triumph written in the most exquisite prose. It is a profound and moving meditation on the question of what it means to live a meaningful life. This book, this story, and these characters will remain with me forever. American Hagwon confirms what has long been true: Min Jin Lee is one of the best writers of our time." -- Clint Smith, author of Above Ground and How the Word Is PassedReview Quotes: "I love American Hagwon so much. Min Jin Lee is phenomenally the real thing. I was completely not ready for the brilliance of this book and the way she captured the essence of so many of our lived experiences through the members of the Koh family. I read huge swaths of this book with my heart in my throat and found myself cheering. This book is brilliant."-- Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Brown Girl Dreaming, winner of the National Book Award Review Quotes: " American Hagwon is an immersive, engrossing novel. As the Koh family, brilliantly imagined by Min Jin Lee, moves between South Korea, Australia and California, they each have a fierce and fascinating individuality. This is panorama told in brilliant detail."-- Colm Toibin, author of The Master and Brooklyn Review Quotes: "Readers of American Hagwon will feel as though they know the vibrant and irrepressible Kohs, whose interwoven journeys invite us to reconsider and reflect on the meaning of home, labor, achievement, and belonging across generations and continents. Their challenges are great and their successes hard-earned, yet it is their deep love and ultimate acceptance of one another that makes Lee's characters unforgettable. Their story beautifully captures what it means to find both meaning and refuge in community; to be humbled at times, but never defeated; to make choices that reflect who we truly are; to find good in the unexpected. It shows us that to believe in the next generation is to possess an unquenchable hope for the future. This book is a gift for students of all ages, for those who care for and hope alongside them, and for all of us who are blessed to read and learn from Min Jin Lee." -- Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever KnowReview Quotes: "Min Jin Lee's intimate epic of family, sacrifice, and fortune creates a world that will become as real to you as your own. It's about education and the rice-cooker pressure families face when opportunities run scarce. It's about capitalism, globalization, and human disposability. It's about family and the strange forms love takes when the abyss of insecurity nears. It's about immigrant pain and the truth beneath facile narratives of uplift. In our age of affordability crises, immigration rages, downward mobility, and anxiety about our children's inheritance, there couldn't be a more relevant novel--nor one that so movingly captures what it feels like to be a person today and to struggle." -- Anand Giridharadas, author of Man in the Mirror and Winners Take AllReview Quotes: "Readers of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko won't be disappointed by the compulsively readable American Hagwon. American Hagwon follows the lives of the Koh family from Korea, Australia, and America, with the breadth and urgency of a saga and the intimacy of a short story. Lee explores essential questions such as the role of education, the nature of love, and the conditions of immigrant life, but to appreciate American Hagwon by its themes alone is to limit what it really is. It is, ultimately, a fully realized vision of compassion, passion, and wisdom." -- Krys Lee, author of Drifting House and How I Became a North KoreanReview Quotes: "An absolutely propulsive read. If your faith in either humanity or storytelling has dimmed, American Hagwon will make it blaze again." -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Best of Friends and Home FireReview Quotes: "With her gift for wonderfully empathetic storytelling, this is a profoundly generous and humane novel about duty, family, and the dream of a better life. In this multi-layered portrait of immigrants and expatriates, Min Jin Lee conveys so much human warmth while capturing the stifling pressures of the Korean educational system. I was fully absorbed by the fates of the Koh family and, as the novel worked its cumulative magic, deeply moved by this masterful tale of sacrifice, familial devotion, and, ultimately, acceptance."-- Douglas Stuart, author of John of John and Shuggie Bain, winner of the Booker Prize Review Quotes: "Through masterfully controlled storytelling, Lee patiently explores how her large group of characters' fortunes are shaped by forces from without and within: the powerful lure of sex, the sucking vacuum of greed, the insidiousness of racism, the obligations between parents and children. What makes a good life? The author's wisdom is a gift to her readers." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred)Publisher Marketing: The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author ofPachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty. Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end." --Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children--Bo, DH, and Mido--find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John's oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California--where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children's futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other's lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice--for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers--is a kind of prayer. An immersive, engrossing novel ... this is panorama told in brilliant detail." --Colm Tóibín, bestselling author of Long Island and Brooklyn Review Citations:
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