Miles from Nowhere - Hardcover

Mun, Nami

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594488541 ISBN 13: 9781594488542

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2008

Synopsis

Fleeing her 1980s Bronx family home in the wake of her unfaithful father's abandonment and her mother's mental illness, Korean teen Joon struggles through an adolescence marked by homeless shelters, addiction, and demeaning jobs. A first novel. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Authors

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.

Nami Mun teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Reviews

An intense and gritty look at life o n the streets, Miles from Nowhereearned high praise from critics. Although Mun claims that only one percent is autobiographical, reviewers described the novel as wholly authentic. The strength lies in Joon's distinctive first-person narration—at once poetic, resilient, and very human. Secondary characters, from a junkie-turned-social worker to a violent boyfriend, are equally compelling. Critics also commended Mun's evocative, raw writing of street life. Two reviewers mentioned that the short chapters, which capture a memory or a moment in time, lack clear transitions and cohesion. And readers wishing for a happy story may find the glimmer of hope running through the novel not quite strong enough. Nonetheless, Milesis a strong debut from a writer to watch.
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Mun's first novel is a 1980s urban odyssey in which Joon-Mee, a 12-year-old Korean-American, leaves her troubled Bronx family for the life of a New York City runaway. The novel follows Joon over six years, as she lives in a homeless shelter, finds work as an underage escort and a streetwalker, succumbs to drug addiction and petty crime, then tries to turn it all around. Along the way we meet a cast of addicts, grifters and homeless people, including Wink, a boisterous but vulnerable young street veteran (I didn't even know they had boy prostitutes); Knowledge, a friend who ropes Joon into helping steal her family's Christmas tree; and Benny, a drugged-up orderly and self-destructive love interest. Mun is careful not to lean on the '80s ambience, and Joon's voice, purged of self-pity, sounds clear and strong on every page. Individual scenes, including Joon's first john, her interview with an antagonistic employment counselor and her climactic encounter with a good-hearted former neighbor, are wonderfully written. Unfortunately, the novel's episodic structure prevents Joon's story from building to anything greater than its parts. (Jan.)
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*Starred Review* “My mom turned crazy the night my father left for good,” states Joon, the unflinching 13-year-old narrator in Mun’s explosive first novel. The neglected only child of Korean immigrants soon runs away from her severely depressed mother and their 1980s Bronx home. Finding refuge in a shelter, Joon delicately negotiates a tempestuous alliance with a streetwise girl named Knowledge and a boy hustler called Wink. Pliant, watchful, and quietly courageous, Joon is fascinated by the struggling people she meets, from junkies to sex workers, drunks, thieves, and wackos. But for all the betrayals, beatings, and risky sex she endures; the heroin habit she acquires; and the chaos and terror of homelessness, jail, hunger, precarious jobs, and suicidal interludes, Joon remains inviolable, kind, and determined. 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. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594488541
• ISBN 13: 9781594488542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304