Miles from Nowhere
By Nami Mun
(Riverhead Hardcover, Hardcover, 9781594488542, 304pp.)
Publication Date: January 2009
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Paperback (September 2009)
Categories: Literary
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Selected by Indie Booksellers for the January 2009 Indie Next ListA major new voice in fiction debuts with the electrifying and heartbreaking story of a teenage runaway on the streets of 1980s New York.
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.
In raw and beautiful prose, Nami Mun delivers the story of a young woman who is at once tough and vulnerable, world-weary and naive, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. In the process, Mun creates one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction and establishes herself as an extraordinarily talented new voice.
Brutally honest, linguistically inventive, and profoundly moving, Miles from Nowhere is a work of fiction that will haunt and inspire a generation of readers.
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.
1. Beginning with helping to steal a Christmas tree, we see Joon participate in acts that aren’t fully legal throughout most of the book. Her actions clearly don’t fit within conventional morality, but is there an ethical code to the way she behaves on the street? Is Joon a principled person? Is Knowledge?
?[A] searing debut?[Mun] writes with lovely precision, lending a hallucinatory beauty to the bleak world she has created.?
?People Magazine (Four stars)-- People Pick of the Week
Mun's use of firm, unshowy language is just one of the sinews in her first novel...Mun..has a resume that mirrors Joon's: Avon lady, street vendor, bartender, nursing home worker. She certainly would have reaped far more publicity if she'd cast Miles From Nowhere as a memoir. It's to her credit as an artist that she has written this unsettling, unsentimental novel instead."
?Orlando Sentinel
"A gritty, riveting story..Miles From Nowhere is filled with soft and lovely descriptive touches..That's the jumpy, fluttering core of "Miles From Nowhere": its ability to zip back and forth between despair and joy, between degradation and exhilaration."
? Chicago Tribune
"Brilliant and authentic...those who delight in the raw power of words have a new author to add to our libraries."
?Dallas Morning News
"A remarkable debut novel ...It is an intense look at life on the streets, one that gives genuine voice and heart to struggling people on society's margins...[with] brilliant description, achingly real narration and an affecting central character."
?Seattle Post- Intelligencer
?[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 Review)
??grim but absolutely authentic?A haunting debut.?
?Library Journal (Starred Review)
?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, author of 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, author of 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, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black
?Nami Mun is easily one of the most important new talents in American fiction.?
?Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh
This book is on these lists:
Books to buy 3 by lccushmanStephanieNM's Wish List by StephanieNM
SayMeredith's Wish List by SayMeredith
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