The October Rumpus Book Club: “American Hagwon” with Min Jin Lee

The October installment of the relaunch The Rumpus Book Club* will be on October 26th at 7pm ET. Host Debbie Millman will be speaking with New York Times best-selling author Min Jin Lee about her brand new book American Hagwon. 

You can register for the book club here.

In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee tells the story of the Koh family—John and Helen and their three children, Bo, DH, and Mido—whose carefully constructed middle-class life in Korea is shattered by betrayal and the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Their search for stability takes them from Seoul to Sydney and eventually to Southern California, where the children begin to imagine new futures while their parents discover that much of what once defined their worth—their education, experience, and understanding of how success is achieved—has not traveled with them. At the heart of the novel is an almost devotional faith in education: the belief that if parents work hard enough, sacrifice enough, and give their children every possible advantage, the next generation might finally be safe. But Lee is interested in what happens when that promise becomes uncertain. Expansive yet intimate, American Hagwon is a story about immigration and class, ambition and duty, the burdens parents pass to their children alongside their hopes, and the complicated forms love can take when sacrifice becomes a way of life.

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Pachinko and Free Food For Millionaires. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award, r unner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times  “100 Best Books of the Century.” Lee’s third novel American Hagwon will be published on September 29, 2026. 

 As New York State Author Laureate (2025-2027), Lee received the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. Her fiction has been translated into over 35 languages. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and The Times of London. She is a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College. She is at work on the novel, Marshall Plan, the fourth of the Diaspora Quartet, and writing Name Recognition, a memoir. Lee lives in Harlem with her family.

Please register here and join us on October 26th at 7pm ET. 

*PSA: There have been some scam e-mails purportedly sent from The Rumpus, soliciting authors for our book club for a fee. Please disregard these e-mails. Official Rumpus e-mails will always come from therumpus.net, from a senior editor on our official masthead, and we do not charge authors to be featured in our book club. Money flows to the writer. Never forget!