Nami Mun: Miles From Nowhere
1,128 views · Published 13 January 2014 · 48:52 · Indexed 23 October 2026
Channel: GBH Forum Network · 2014 · Education
Nami Mun discusses her first novel, Miles From Nowhere. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships and residencies from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Eastern Frontier, Squaw Valley Writers' Conference, Tin House Writers' Conference, and Key West Literary Seminar. Mun was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up there and in Bronx, New York. She currently lives in Chicago. Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father's infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of 13, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins. Joon's adolescent years take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and, finally, toward something resembling hope.
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