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Wednesday, January 21st

Riverhead

Price: $21.95

NAMI MUN

reads from her acclaimed first novel

Miles from Nowhere

Harvard Book Store and Center for New Words are excited to host award-winning fiction writer NAMI MUN for a reading from her acclaimed debut novel Miles from Nowhere.

Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father’s infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins. Joon’s adolescent years take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and, finally, toward something resembling hope.

“[E]xplosive first novel… Mun’s gritty and empathic coming-of-age tale confronts the madness that lurks on the periphery of lust and love, the poison of racism, the suffering of the unloved, and the fierce survival instincts, adaptability, and radiance of young people. There is nothing simplistic or sensationalized here as Mun, a writer of gravitas, portrays the dispossessed and the cast-out, reminding us how quickly things can go disastrously wrong, how tough it is to live outside the margins.”
— Booklist (starred)

“…grim but absolutely authentic… A haunting debut.” —Library Journal (starred)

“Austere, but with its own bleak beauty.” —Kirkus Review

“Stunning. The visceral power of Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere sneaks up on you—whatever heartache or humor you find within these pages is embodied in her shimmering prose, distilled to the bone. I found myself reading passages out loud to friends, passages I thought were hallucinatory and funny, only to find myself choking back real tears.” —Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)

“A starkly beautiful book, shot through with grace and lit by an off-hand street poetry. Nami Mun takes a cast of junkies and runaways and brings them fiercely and frankly to life. It’s a measure of the artistry of the work that even in their grimmest, darkest moments, rather than being repelled by these characters, we want to stay beside them, as if to care for them, or at least to bear witness to their lives.”  —Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl)

“Suspenseful, funny, painful, and poetic, Nami Mun’s debut shows a talent for close observation and a prose that fills the grit of street life with flashes of gold.” —Janet Fitch (White Oleander and Paint It Black)

“Nami Mun is easily one of the most important new talents in American fiction.” —Alexander Chee (Edinburgh)

CONTACT:

General Info:
617.661.1515

Media:
617.661.1424 ex.1

Email:

Nami Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. She has worked as a door-to-door Avon Lady, a dance hostess, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal investigator. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she garnered a Hopwood Award for fiction and the Farrar Prize. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her stories have been published in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Evergreen Review, Witness, and other journals.