Min Jin Lee on the Healing Power of Fiction

Min Jin Lee could be considered an exemplar of the old adage “slow and steady wins the race.” The author’s bestselling 2017 novel Pachinko—a National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller that was adapted into a television series for Apple TV+ in 2022—took 30 years to write from its inception as a short story. Her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), took five years. These extensive periods of time become understandable, or even seem scant, within the sprawling, multigenerational contexts of her novels—Pachinko spans almost a century—into which she pours deep anthropological, sociological, and journalistic research. Lee is also the editor of the just-published The Best American Short Stories 2023 (Mariner Books) anthology, and she’s currently at work on American Hagwon, the third novel in her diasporic trilogy.

On this episode, she talks about the complex role of time in Pachinko, her miraculous recovery from chronic liver disease, and why she likens short-story writing to polishing diamonds.

Special thanks to our Season 8 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes: 

[00:25] Min Jin Lee

[03:39] Viet Thanh Nguyen

[06:08] Free Food for Millionaires

[06:10] Pachinko

[06:19] The Best American Short Stories 2023

[08:08] Amy Tan

[08:09] Salman Rushdie

[09:36] “Bread and Butter”

[09:37] “Motherland”

[09:38] “The Best Girls”

[10:04] William Trevor

[10:06] Alice Munro

[12:45] Yale University

[17:23] Harvard Business School

[17:34] Fashion Institute of Technology

[47:37] Queens Public Library in Elmhurst

[49:21] The Bronx High School of Science

[49:32] The Hotchkiss School

[49:33] Phillips Exeter Academy

[58:46] American Hagwon

[01:03:33] Stoner by John Williams