Eugenia Kim's debut novel, The Calligrapher's Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was Best Historical Novel and Critic's Pick by The Washington Post. Her stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere.Kim's new novel is The Kinship of Secrets.
Recently I asked the author about what I was reading. Her reply:
Since 2017, there seems to have been an explosion of Korean American writers with debut work or new books, both fiction and nonfiction. This trend seems to also be reflected in the larger Asian American writing community as well, but there have been so many Korean American new publications I haven’t yet had the opportunity to expand out of this specificVisit Eugenia Kim's website.category. The acclaimed best-seller, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, stands out, as does Alexander Chee’s collection of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. In the past two months, I’ve read several other KA authors, and this list happily continues to grow. I regularly read poetry to inspire my writing practice, and at the moment it is Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems, and Monica Youn’s (another Korean American) Blackacre. I also have to read student work, but this semester I’ve been blessed with hard-working and talented students who make reading their work a pleasure. I did reread my own novel in its new hardcover form, and was relieved to see that I think it holds up.
The Page 69 Test: The Kinship of Secrets.
--Marshal Zeringue
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