Invitation

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

In Invitation, men and women try and fail to connect to the people they want to be with. As they remember the first people who dominated their lives—parents, best friends, cousins, crushes—they find themselves repeating old patterns. A boy shares seemingly disturbing details about his mother’s disappearance with an aloof tutor. A man stalks an ex-girlfriend but finds her missing. A woman wakes up in an empty apartment—and to every mother’s worst nightmare. When a callous young man penetrates the bell jar of an elderly couple’s quiet life, their live-in assistant learns a cruel lesson about loyalty.

Why are we the way we are with one another? And what do our relationships ask us to become? In these stories, set mostly in South Korea, all must contend with the uncertainty and danger that comes with connection, real or imagined. These stories by Mi Jin Kim ask us to consider what it is we really want from the people we think we need.