As a follow up to my post on literature and fiction titles coming up in 2017 (now updated twice), here are some of the upcoming non-fiction publications that I’ll be looking out for. There are of course many others: simply do an advanced search on Amazon with keyword “Korea” and publication year 2017 and you may find something more up your street.
- Charlotte Horlyck’s Korean Art from the 19th Century to the Present will be published in June 2017 from Reaktion books. This will definitely be on my bookshelf as soon as it’s out in the shops. Or earlier if I can somehow manage it.
- Film scholars will be waiting for Dong Hoon Kim’s Eclipsed Cinema: The Film Culture of Colonial Korea, from Edinburgh University Press (who also brought us Shin Chi-yun & Julian Stringer’s New Korean Cinema). Coming in March 2017.
- Patrice Pavis, a former professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury will have his Performing Korea published by Palgrave Macmillan in February 2017.
- Don Baker’s Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea is published by University of Hawai’i in May 2017.
- 130 years after the British navy withdrew from Geomundo, Stephen Royle’s Anglo-Korean Relations and the Port Hamilton Affair, 1885-1887 examines the circumstances of the occupation (Routledge, April 2017)
- The phenomenally successful book The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to be Calm in a Busy World by Haenim Sunim gets rendered into English by noted translator Kim Chi-young (Penguin Life, February 2017)
- UK-based violinist Min-jin Kym tells the true story of having her Stradivarius stolen in Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung (Viking, April 2017).
- If you want to get angry about why certain restaurants get favoured while your own favourites are ignored, you could try the recently published Michelin Guide to Seoul (Michelin, January 2017). Read ZenKimchi ‘s views on the publication first.
- Young Ick Lew’s The Making of the First Korean President: Syngman Rhee’s Quest for Independence (1875-1948), first published by University of Hawaii Press in 2013, gets a paperback release in March 2017.
- Mike Breen’s The New Koreans comes in April from Viking. This is a follow-up to his 1998 book The Koreans – Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies which we enthusiastically reviewed here.
- Jieun Baek’s North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society will be arriving in February courtesy of Yale University Press.
- Finally, two volumes on cultural preservation and promotion are scheduled for later in the year, though as there is no cover art yet maybe they’ll slip into next year: Roald Maliangkay’s Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea’s Central Folksong Traditions is anticipated from University of Hawai’i Press in October, and Hye-Kyung Lee’s Cultural Policy in South Korea: From Cultural Control to the Korean Wave is expected from Routledge in September.