My Year Abroad, about an American collegian’s adventures across Asia
and in witness protection in New Jersey. Lee, a creative writing professor at Stanford University, also wrote
The Surrendered(2011), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His
On Such a Full Sea (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and his debut
Native Speaker (1995) won the PEN/Hemingway award.
The Seoul-born, Westchester, N.Y.-raised Lee can’t seem to shake his history as a Wall Street equities analyst a job he quit after exactly 365 days (he went to the recruitment on campus for the free Scotch and raw bar) but he was also the restaurant critic for free downtown newspaper