Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and the Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere (2009), she received a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles From Nowhere was selected as Editors’ Choice and Top Ten First Novels by Booklist, Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon, and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her Best New Novelist of 2009. Nami has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to get a BA in English from UC Berkeley, an MFA from University of Michigan, and has received fellowships from organizations such as Yaddo, MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Tin House. In 2009 she received a Whiting Award in Fiction, and in 2011 she became a US Delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing and Chicago. Her stories have been published in Granta, Tin House, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Evergreen Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in Chicago.
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Miles from NowhereA Novel
Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
Miles from Nowhere:A Novel -
Miles from NowhereA Novel
At night I used to ride the ferry back and forth, from the city to Staten Island. I’d watch the diamond lights smearing the wet window glass or stand out on the windy deck as the regulars sat crooked, drinking their pints and shouting about different kids of loss. The engine shook my legs. The water pricked my skin. I stood on the railing and let the wind sting my eyes and tickle my veins where a warm drug bubbled through, heating up like the wires of an electric blanket. I was sixteen and pregnant then, thinking that the ups and downs of the East River would kill it somehow.
Miles from Nowhere:A Novel -
Miles from NowhereA Novel
That night I went home and put a grocery bag over my head. I wanted to see what the head felt like, separate from my body. I cinched the bag right around my neck and lay down without letting go of my grip. With my every breath the white plastic bag crinkled in and out, making too much noise, and the bare bulb hanging above me seemed foggy. My face turned damp. My breath smelled exactly like what I’d eaten for lunch—a bowl of instant noodles, a pickle. I tightened the grip on the bag, and eventually my breathing slowed, enough for me to sense a layer of mist licking my eyes. The plastic barely crinkled. Slowly my head began disremembering the body, sighing it off gently, until all I could feel was my now-giant skull and my own arm, still strangling the bag. It was quiet. And then too quiet.
Miles from Nowhere:A Novel
“Vivid and mournful . . . an emotionally upending story. Mun relays it all with a jarring honesty that makes the book both difficult to read and impossible to forget.” —The Boston Globe [on Miles From Nowhere]
“ . . . an enthralling work of fiction that offers special insight . . . a remarkable debut novel . . . It is an intense look at life on the streets, one that gives genuine voice and heart to struggling people on society’s margins. [Joon’s] distinctive voice—deadpan, unassuming, but also oddly poetic—is one of the novel’s greatest strengths and a constant source of wonder.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer [on Miles From Nowhere]
“ . . . exquisite and shattering debut novel . . . Like Holden [Caulfield], Joon is acutely sensitive with a dead-on, deadpan wit, a longing for truth, and a terrible fear of never knowing love . . . she embodies life’s insistence, and our astonishing capacity for not only survival, but also transformation . . . Miles from Nowhere is a work of lacerating honesty and cauterizing compassion.” —Chicago Public Radio