Secondhand World

Zusatztext "Told in achingly evocative prose that lingers in your consciousness. . . . Raw! emotionally urgent and peppered with acute detail." — Los Angeles Times “Engaging both history and the needs of the passionate self! Secondhand World reveals an exquisite and powerful imagination.” — The Providence Journal “Leaves the reader breathless with questions about one’s own capacity to forgive.” — Ms. “Katherine Min gives such celebrated writers as Louise Erdrich! Zadie Smith and Amy Tan a run for their money. Exquisitely written! wrenchingly imagined! Secondhand World will stand your hair on end.” — The Buffalo News Informationen zum Autor Katherine Min was born in Champaign, Illinois, and was raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Schenectady, New York. She attended Amherst College and the Columbia School of Journalism. She worked as a journalist in Boston; Seoul, Korea; Virginia and New Hampshire. Min is currently a professor of creative writing at Plymouth State University. She lives in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Klappentext Isadora Myung Hee Sohn—Isa—has just spent ninety-five days in a pediatric burn unit in Albany, New York, recovering from the fire that burned her house and killed her parents. Moving back in time, Secondhand World casts a devastating spell, revealing the circumstances that led to the fire. Growing up the daughter of Korean-born parents, Isa is bullied by American classmates and barely noticed at home. Seeking the company of another outsider, Isa falls in love with Hero, an albino boy. But what starts out as a small teenage rebellion sets in motion a series of events and revelations Isa never could have foreseen.My name is Isadora Myung Hee Sohn and I am eighteen years old. I was recently ninety-five days on a pediatric burn unit at Tri-State Medical Center, in Albany, New York, being treated for second- and third-degree burns on my legs, complicated by a recurring bacterial infection. The same fire that injured me killed my parents, Hae Kyoung Chung and Tae Mun Sohn, on June 11, 1976, at approximately 3:20 a.m. It's very isolating to recover from a severe burn injury. The pain requires a great deal of attention and inward focus. While your skin tissue rages and dies, you try and put yourself as far away as possible mentally, to take refuge in small, retrievable thoughts. Nursery rhymes are sometimes useful, as are television theme songs and knock-knock jokes. Here's a riddle. A jumbo jet takes off from New York en route to Vancouver with 246 people on board. There's a massive snowstorm, visibility worsens, passengers pray and panic. The pilot loses control, and the plane ends up doing a nosedive on the border of the United States and Canada. The weather is so bad it takes the rescue helicopters two days to get to the remote crash site in the mountains. When they finally manage to land, amid the snow and the wreckage, they're confronted with a terrible dilemma. Since the plane crashed exactly on the boundary line separating the two countries, the recovering authorities don't know whether to bury the survivors in Canada or the United States. It took me a while to get it. The trick is knowing where to focus. There's so much clamor and confusion—the plane, the storm, the panic—that you're easily thrown off. You end up overlooking what you should have noticed right away. The fact is that survivors aren't buried. They keep walking around. They go through the varied motions of normalcy, trying to forget the screams, the shudder of the fuselage, the sound of crumpling metal. The frozen wait among the dead for rescue. Celluloid Many years before the fire that killed my parents, there was another fire. In Seoul, Korea, my mother had grown up among a harem of sisters, hoarded like treasure, quarantined like...

Product details

• Authors: Katherine Min
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.02.2008
• EAN: 9780307274991
• ISBN: 978-0-307-27499-1
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 15 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature