The Reader's Room: Min Jin Lee, FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES June 4, 2007

In our weekly quest to bring you the best fiction and non-fiction out there, we turn from last week's fantastic non-fiction experience and dive headfirst into an impressive debut of the fictional variety, as we welcome Min Jin Lee, who will read from her first novel FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES (Warner Books).

Our series convenes each Monday night at 7:00 pm. It's called "The Reader's Room: Where Writers Take Center Stage" for very specific reasons: the actual stage and lovely performance space where our writers can read with the respect and attention they deserve. We always have the reader's books available for sale.

Our venue: Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction, 34 Avenue A, between 2nd & 3rd Streets. (mopitkins.com) ( Table service with food & drink available- while you enjoy the reading) There is a one-drink minimum, so if you get there early, come upstairs and take a seat in the performance space, where a waitress will serve you.

Min Jin Lee (minjinlee.com) went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She then attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York before leaving to write full time. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her work has also been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and anthologized in TO BE REAL (Doubleday, 1995) and BREEDER (Seal Press, 2001). She lives in New York with her husband and son. FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES (Warner Books, May 22, 2007) is her first book.

Praise for Free Food For Millionaires:

"As much as this is an immigrant story, it's also an American story full of class struggle, rugged individualism, social status and above all, the money haves and have-nots. Most of all it's an epic meditation on love, both familial and romantic. Lee offers us love in all its tenacious and painful glory. Free Food is littered with betrayals, illicit sex, numerous levels of unfaithfulness, surprise twists and unexpected turns of the heart."

-- USA Today

"A marvelous page-turner, with well-burnished subplots, this novel gives the 21st Century what the 19th Century knew we needed most: a young heroine with a range of worldly options that are all more or less seductive and all more or less unacceptable. It's a wonderful book."

- Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton and Her Husband

"In her ambitious, skillfully written first novel, Min Jin Lee draws a panoramic portrait of contemporary Korean-Americans and their 'white boy' colleagues, lovers, and friends. Besides a revealing look at the clash of values between the immigrant generation and its assimilated daughters, we get a surprising study of the young Wall Street opportunists, debt-ridden strivers, lavish spenders, corporate flunkies, and manipulative entrepreneurs who populate one significant corner of American life. Impressive, engrossing, illuminating."

- Alix Kates Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and Drinking the Rain

Looking forward to a nosh, a drink, and some fine writerly company with you!

Official Website: http://www.myspace.com/freefoodformillionaires