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Risking It All for a Convenience Store
Henry Holt & Company
March 2011
On Sale: March 1, 2011
320 pages ISBN: 0805093435 EAN: 9780805093438 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
This warm and funny tale of an earnest preppy editor finding
himself trapped behind the counter of a Brooklyn convenience
store is about family, culture and identity in an age of
discombobulation. It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the
daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents'
self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at
the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon
become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles,
Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws'
Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in
George Plimpton's Upper East Side townhouse by day, and
heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle
lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store's
tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait
of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with
shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to
Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a
transformative experience for everyone involved as they
struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while
sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.
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