Omnivoracious: BookExpo On-the-Floor Interview: Nami Mun on Miles from Nowhere

BookExpo On-the-Floor Interview: Nami Mun on Miles from Nowhere

by Tom on June 12, 2008

Two of the most attention-drawing panels at BookExpo are the Buzz Panel, in which a half-dozen editors talk up an upcoming book or two of theirs they are most excited about, and the Emerging Voices panel, where a handful of about-to-arrive authors read from and talk about their new work. I'm not sure how people get to be on those panels, but it's telling that one book represented on both this year, first by its Riverhead editor, Megan Lynch, and then by its author, Nami Mun, was Miles from Nowhere, a debut novel about a young Korean American runaway in New York City in the 80s. I had heard the (very good) buzz on it too, and had a chance to read an early copy of the book and talk to Nami herself after her panel.

Her book is indeed wonderful--it was described to me as very dark, and it certainly is that at moments, but she writes with a delicate, humane attention throughout that makes even the darkest moments bearable and gives even her most terrible characters empathetic depth. And our talk (and then getting to visit with Nami some more later) turned out to be a real highlight of my time in LA. I always like to be one of the first to talk to an author, before they've hit the media roundrobin and heard all my questions 100 times before. But it's especially exciting to talk to someone who hasn't yet had a chance to talk about her work in public before, after spending so long--eight years, in her case--working on it without any certainty it would see the light of day (much less get anointed with buzz). We talked about, among other things, Hemingway's iceberg, selling cheap jewelry to the cooks in a Chinese restaurant, figuring out how to make a young and unreflective narrator grow into someone who can look back on and make some sense of her life, and the book that made her think she could tell the stories she wanted, Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn.

This might be the first you've heard about Miles from Nowhere, but I'm sure it won't be the last, although you may have to wait a bit: it won't be out until January (well, December 26, to be exact):

P.S. Of course, on seeing the bookshelves in the background of her author photo, my first impulse was to make a list of what I could see. Looks like it's the avant-garde theory section of her library--these are the ones I could decipher (let me know if you can figure out any more in the larger photo below):