Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Kim Sagwa is South Korea’s young, brilliant, fearless writer. In Mina, Kim has created a frenzied language of three teenagers—Mina, Minho, and Crystal—living in ‘P City,’ which in Korean sounds the same as ‘Blood City.’ Beneath the immaculately manicured middle-class affluence, chandelier glitter, free-market economy, and Western cultural hegemony runs the blood of Korea’s dictatorial conformity and historical fratricide. The trio are hollow teenagers in the age of globalization—they mirror one another, reflecting, deflecting, and signaling their helplessness and hatred for the world that has created them. Mina is a story of ‘abjection,’ to borrow Kristeva’s term—a state in which ‘meaning collapses.’ Mina leads us to a place where mirrors of the self and world fold, collapse, shatter, and bleed to death. Mina is one of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s finest translations." Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
Description
“She doesn’t know what to do, and that amounts to a state of torture.”
Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She’s also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her mp3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. Her non-stop frenzy never quite manages the one thing that might calm her down: opening up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn’t talked with her best friend, Mina, nor Mina’s brother, whom she’s developing a serious crush on. And Crystal’s starting to lose her grip.
In this shocking English debut, award-winning Korean author Kim Sagwa delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of modern-day adolescence. With pitch-perfect dialogue and a precise eye for detail, Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist–at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused. As one bad decision leads to another, this promising life spirals to a devastating climax.
About the Author
Kim Sagwa is one of South Korea’s most acclaimed emerging writers. She is the author of several novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards. She lives in New York City.
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of numerous works of modern Korean fiction. Their most recent translations are the graphic novel Moss by Yoon Taeho, The Human Jungle by Cho Chŏngnae, and Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader, from Columbia University Press.