🎟️ Please note: Tickets are REQUIRED. Ticket options include:
2 Guests + 1 Book Ticket: Each ticket admits two (2) guests into the venue and includes one (1) copy of American Hagwon ($36 + tax). Books will be handed out upon entry.
1 Guest + 1 Book Ticket: Each ticket admits one (1) guest into the venue and includes one (1) copy of American Hagwon ($36 + tax). Books will be handed out upon entry.
Additional books will be available for sale at the event.
Prezante an patenarya avèk Books & Books, join us as we welcome author Min Jin Lee and independent journalist Katie Phang for an evening get-together to discuss Lee’s recently released novel, American Hagwon (Cardinal, $36). American Hagwon is a family’s journey to find satisfaction and meaning in spite of life’s tricks, upheavals, and trials. Once a middle-class family living comfortably in Seoul, John and Helen Koh, along with their three children, must start over in Southern California after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires epi Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. 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. 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. She lives in Harlem with her family.
Katie Phang is an independent journalist and trial lawyer. Formerly the host of “The Katie Phang Show” on MSNBC, Katie also has served as a legal contributor/legal correspondent for several media outlets, such as NBC, MSNBC, and Fox News. She continues to have a front-row seat to some of the most consequential moments in recent history, including the unsealing of multiple criminal indictments against Donald Trump, oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court on presidential immunity, and attending the only criminal trial of an American president.
After several years in mainstream media, Katie departed cable tv to dive into independent media. Recognizing the importance of fearless, fact-based reporting, Katie launched her own YouTube channel: Katie Phang News (@katiephangnews) and Substack: Law and Disorder (@katiephang), leveraging her experience, including as a trial lawyer for more than 25 years, to provide compelling analysis and commentary on the latest legal and political issues across the globe. She cuts through the spin to deliver accurate, truthful information with the goal of creating an ecosystem of pro-democracy, “high-information” Americans.
Katie also is proud to serve as a Senior Advisor for Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan organization that is committed to defending the rule of law, fighting corruption, and protecting free and fair elections. Combining her legal experience with her media expertise, she focuses on battling autocracy in the court of law and the court of public opinion.
At a time when every minute is critical, Katie pushes to meet the urgency of the moment with the urgency of the message.
Book Summary:
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
Nan American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.