I didn’t think ‘Pachinko’ could be topped. Then I read ‘American Hagwon’

Min Jin Lee‘s new novel, American Hagwon, has been nearly 10 years in the making; if it had taken 20, I’d still wonder how she held all these stories, these lives, such pain and love in her imagination for the time it took to find the words to embody them on the page.

The novel is the third in her projected four-novel series about the Korean diaspora. Pachinko, the second in the series, was a finalist for