And as I read the Book of Genesis, I started to see why the Bible has been the ur-text for so many Western writers of classics: It’s such a rich text, one that could spawn thousands if not hundreds of thousands of novels, poems, and plays. Before each writing session, I started to read the Bible like a writer, thinking about language, character, and themes. Then I read somewhere that Willa Cather read a chapter of the Bible every day before she started work. Min Jin Lee: After I quit being a lawyer in ’95, I was having a lot of trouble writing. She lives in New York City and spoke to me by phone. Free Food for Millionaires, her first novel, was published in 2007. Lee spent years living in Tokyo, interviewing Korean immigrants as she researched and wrote the book. Pachinko was a National Book Award finalist this year, and has been named one of The New York Times’ 10 best books of 2017. Named for a Japanese pinball game that combines both skill and luck, Pachinko shows how momentous acts of kindness and cruelty shape lives through subsequent generations. As a series of unfortunate events leads Sunja, the only daughter of a widowed innkeeper, from Korea to a new life in Japan, the hard circumstances of each character-physical deformity, a case of tuberculosis, an unplanned pregnancy-become opportunities for transformation. Pachinko dramatizes this idea starting in a Korean fishing town, early in the 20th century, with a cast of characters rendered with startling humanity.
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