Sunday, October 4 at 7:00 p.m. – Min Jin Lee – American Hagwon
Twenty-seven seasons in, Talking Volumes — presented by MPR News and the Minnesota Star Tribune — remains one of the region’s most anticipated literary event series. This fall, five bestselling authors sit down with award-winning journalists Kerri Miller and Catharine Richert for deep conversations about their books, their lives, and the ideas shaping our world. And we’ll do it all in a welcoming new home: The O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University.
Join Talking Volumes for an unforgettable evening with Min Jin Lee, the acclaimed author of Pachinko, as she discusses American Hagwon, her sweeping new novel of family, ambition, and survival across decades and continents. Following the Koh family from Korea to Sydney to Southern California, Lee traces the sacrifices, betrayals, and enduring hopes that shape immigrant life and the pursuit of opportunity. Rich with emotional depth and panoramic in scope, American Hagwon explores education, identity, love, and the price families pay to secure a better future for the next generation. Lee’s work is celebrated for its moral clarity, literary grace, and deep compassion for ordinary lives lived under extraordinary pressures. Don’t miss the chance to hear one of today’s most admired novelists in conversation at The O’Shaughnessy Auditorium for what promises to be one of the season’s most stirring literary events.
About the Author
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.
About the Book
At last, the National Book Award finalist and NYT bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: Min Jin Lee has written a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, one that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
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.
Talking Volumes would like to thank our season sponsor Episcopal Homes.
