"Kim Sagwa is South Korea's young, brilliant, fearless writer. In Mina, Kim has created a frenzied language of three teenagers--Mina, Minho, and Crystal--living in 'P City, ' which in Korean sounds the same as 'Blood City.' Beneath the immaculately manicured middle-class affluence, chandelier glitter, free-market economy, and Western cultural hegemony runs the blood of Korea's dictatorial conformity and historical fratricide. The trio are hollow teenagers in the age of globalization--they mirror one another, reflecting, deflecting, and signaling their helplessness and hatred for the world that has created them. Mina is a story of 'abjection, ' to borrow Kristeva's term--a state in which 'meaning collapses.' Mina leads us to a place where mirrors of the self and world fold, collapse, shatter, and bleed to death. Mina is one of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton's finest translations." --Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War

"Mina gets to the core of Korean teenagers. Kim Sagwa's fragmented rhetoric stands for a generation that has no choice but to set imitation as its standard. The novel, which points out a universal desire for unattainable genuineness, focuses on teenagers while at the same time shining light on Korean society at large. Readers open their eyes wide to the agonizing violence of a character torn up by the inability to bear self-deception." --Han Yujoo, author of The Impossible Fairy Tale