Giveaway ends Friday! Enter to win Min Jin Lee's best-selling generational saga 'Pachinko'
A little thank you for being a Foreign Bodies subscriber
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Happy 2020, Foreign Bodies! I am overjoyed to share the first giveaway of the year with you, a best-selling family saga set in 1900s Korea. Korean American author Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is one of my all-time favorite books, and nearly everyone I know who’s read it can’t stop singing its praises. I’ll be mailing the winning subscriber a copy of Pachinko, packaged with a note from the beloved author herself. Entries accepted through Friday, Jan. 17 at 11:59 p.m. EST.
About the prize
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a saga about four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fighting to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan after being exiled from their home.
"In this sprawling book, history itself is a character,” the New York Times’ Krys Lee wrote in 2017. “‘Pachinko’ is about outsiders, minorities and the politically disenfranchised. But it is so much more besides. Each time the novel seems to find its locus — Japan’s colonization of Korea, World War II as experienced in East Asia, Christianity, family, love, the changing role of women — it becomes something else. It becomes even more than it was."
A warning: This novel is absolutely gut-wrenching.
In her acknowledgments, “Min Jin Lee writes that the seeds for what would later become Pachinko were first planted in college, when she heard an American missionary give a talk about the oppression of Koreans in Japan,” Nina Li Coomes notes in a critical essay for Ploughshares. “There, the missionary told a story about a middle school boy who died by suicide. When his bewildered parents went through his school things to understand what could drive their child to jump to his death, they found the handwriting of their son’s Japanese schoolmates scrawled across his notebooks, reading Go back to your country and Die, die, die, die.” The story is retold in the novel as an aside.
The book is named for the slot-machine-like game found throughout Japan, one that “unifies the central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging,” according to Krys Lee. “For the ethnic Korean population in Japan, discriminated against and shut out of traditional occupations, pachinko parlors are the primary mode of finding work and accumulating wealth.”
Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and one of the Times’ Ten Best Books of 2017.
About Foreign Bodies giveaways
Whenever I read a book I fall in love with, I’m driven to give everyone around me a sprinkle of the magic. That means you too. These little surprise giveaways are my special way of thanking you for joining the Foreign Bodies family. I hope the books and collections I send your way make you feel a little more at home, or perhaps inspire you to learn a bit more about the myriad voices out there, voices we don’t get the privilege of hearing as often as we could.
Giveaway rules
Entrants must be paying subscribers or comps (gift recipients) of the Foreign Bodies Newsletter and must have a valid U.S. mailing address. You may only enter once and must use the email address affiliated with your account. Each entry will be assigned a number and winner(s) will be chosen using the Random Integer Generator. Winner(s) will be notified via email and your gift will come personally packaged in the mail.
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please email 4nbodies@gmail.com.
Recommend a book!
Have a favorite immigrant-written book, collection of essays or poetry or what-have-you? Stories that made you feel understood? Stories about immigrant or refugee experiences, about mental illness? Send your recommendations—especially if it’s your own work. And check out the wealth of books and essays we already have up on foreignbodies.net!
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Talk soon.
Love,
Fiza