Mina by Kim Sagwa

Mina by Kim Sagwa

She doesn't know what to do, and that amounts to a state of torture. Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She's also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her mp3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. Her non- stop frenzy never quite manages the one thing that might calm her down: opening up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn't talked with her best friend, Mina, nor Mina's brother, whom she's developing a serious crush on. And Crystal's starting to lose her grip. In this shocking English debut, award-winning Korean author Kim Sagwa delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of modern-day adolescence. With pitch-perfect dialogue and a precise eye for detail, Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist--at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused. As one bad decision leads to another, this promising life spirals to a devastating climax.

Kim Sagwa is one of South Korea's most acclaimed young writers. She is the author of several novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and has been shortlisted for several major South Korean awards, including the Munji Prize and the Young Writers Award. Kim contributes columns to two major Seoul newspapers, and she co-translated John Freeman's book How to Read a Novelist into Korean. She lives in New York City. Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton have translated dozens of books together since 1985, including the award-winning women's anthology Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers and the graphic novel Moss by Yoon Taeho, serialized at The Huffington Post. They have received numerous awards and fellowships, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 4th Annual Chametzky Prize for Translation, given by The Massachusetts Review, and a residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.