and more. She is a Kundiman fellow and has received support through scholarships and grants from Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Speculative Literature Foundation. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.
A Thousand Times Before is Thanki's debut novel.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that demonstrate
the consequences of the world we live in, the ways that our political histories are inseparable from how we walk through the world. That the political and the personal are always, always, intertwined.One title on the list:
Pachinko by Min Jin LeeRead about another novel on the list.
Few intergenerational novels do it like Pachinko. Immediately, the reader is invested in Sunja’s life: from the circumstancesof her parents’ marriage, her adolescence and later exploitation by the wealthy Hansu, and the marriage to minister Isak which whisks her away to Osaka. Lee lingers in early descriptions of Sunja’s fishing village, and these early moments throw her experiences during the Japanese occupation of Korea into stark contrast.
Pachinko is in many ways about the power and consequences of a secret, the way it can trickle through children and children’s children, and, all the while, the ways in which a woman might protect herself and her family.
Pachinko is among the Amazon Book Review editors' twelve favorite long books, Gina Chen's twelve books for fans of HBO’s Succession, Cindy Fazzi's eight books about the impact of Japanese imperialism during WWII, Eman Quotah's eight books about mothers separated from their daughters, Karolina Waclawiak's six favorite books on loss and longing, Allison Patkai's top six books with strong female voices, Tara Sonin's twenty-one books for fans of HBO’s Succession, and six books Jia Tolentino recommends.
--Marshal Zeringue
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