Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
In Invitation, men and women try and fail to connect to the people they want to be with. As they remember the first people who dominated their lives--parents, best friends, cousins, crushes--they find themselves repeating old patterns. A boy shares seemingly disturbing details about his mother's disappearance with an aloof tutor. A man stalks an ex-girlfriend but finds her missing. A woman wakes up in an empty apartment--and to every mother's worst nightmare. When a callous young man penetrates the bell jar of an elderly couple's quiet life, their live-in assistant learns a cruel lesson about loyalty.
Why are we the way we are with one another? And what do our relationships ask us to become? In these stories, set mostly in South Korea, all must contend with the uncertainty and danger that comes with connection, real or imagined. These stories by Mi Jin Kim ask us to consider what it is we really want from the people we think we need.
Mi Jin Kim was born in Seoul and grew up in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, her fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Quarter after Eight, and swamp pink. She lives in rural South Korea with her family.
Industry Reviews
"Invitation is an exquisite debut-subtle, elliptical stories, shadowed with menace. Mi Jin Kim's themes are enduring-loneliness and longing, absence and loss-but she revivifies them with a preternatural acuity of detail (the tenuousness of Korean middle-class life is keenly felt) and a mordant reverence for the mysteries of the human condition."-Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes "Invitation is a story collection that accumulates in power as it accrues in tensions and characters and resonant details. This is the work of an important new fiction writer."-Laura Kasischke, author of Lightning Falls in Love "Character is at the center of Mi Jin Kim's arresting and harrowing stories: character in all its complexities, contradictions, deceptions, longings, and desires. In a contemporary short fiction landscape that sometimes favors the speculative and the surreal, Kim's stories are a powerful reminder that the human heart remains the strangest territory of them all-and the wildest ride around. A brilliant, memorable collection."-Anthony Varallo, author of What Did You Do Today? "Invitation is a stunning debut collection made up of stories that are at once irreverent, riveting, mysterious, and heartbreaking. At their surface level, these stories sparkle with cool, vivid detail. But beneath the surface, the characters that make up Invitation are a fragile crew. Their dogs bolt in the night; their love letters are read only after they have been discarded. These lonely men and women endure monsoons and misunderstandings as they follow their dreams in and around Seoul, into drab fast food restaurants and agonizingly tidy apartments. A postmodern Chekhov, Mi Jin Kim is a dazzling talent, and her first book will leave an indelible mark on contemporary fiction."-Douglas Trevor, author of Girls I Know and The Book of Wonders
