A beautifully crafted, enriching saga inspired by East Asian mythology, The Melancholy of Untold History is Minsoo Kang’s debut novel, steeped in history like R.F. Kuang’s Babel, epic in scope like Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, and lyrically exciting like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, interweaving four complex yet entertaining stories as they shape and create a nation’s literary narrative through … [Read More]
Archives: Books
Here is a listing of all the books in the LKL Book DataBase, in the order we happen to have uploaded them (most recent first). For listings in order of publication, visit the DataBase home page which will take you to individual subject listings.
Of Tales and Enigmas
A beautiful lady who can only be seen from far away, a machine that generates an entire civilization, a king who loves the hidden life of an inanimate statue, a city that appears once a year across a great chasm, an ancient Korean king assassinated in the dark of the night, a ghost that haunts … [Read More]
Toward Eternity [forthcoming]
Negotiating the terrain of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, a brilliant, haunting speculative novel from a #1 New York Times bestselling translator that sets out to answer the question: What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology? In a near-future world, … [Read More]
Korean Kirogi Families: Placemaking, Belonging, and Mothering
Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at Fairfax County, Virginia, and Daechi-dong, Seoul, Korea, Korean Kirogi Families explores the dynamics of emplaced transnational families through analyses of the categories of social capital, sense of place, sense of belonging, and mothering among so-called “Korean kirogi families.” A Korean kirogi (wild goose) family is a distinct kind of transnational migrant family that splits their … [Read More]
Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics [forthcoming]
Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi’s transmedia analyses unearth people’s experiences of “wormification”—traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped … [Read More]
Modernization of Korean Theatre in the 20th Century [forthcoming]
Lee provides a comprehensive guide that traces the transformation of Korean theatre from traditional to modern theatre and examines the impact of the introduction of Western plays to Korean society. Important changes in Korean theatre are discussed chronologically from the beginning of the modernization: Sinpa Theatre, Singeuk Theatre, Theatre of Ideology, The Little Theatre Movement, Madanggeuk, experiments for modernizing traditional … [Read More]
The Emergence of the Korean Art Collector and the Korean Art Market [forthcoming]
Articulating the shifting interests in Korean art and offering new ways of conceiving the biases that initiated and impacted its collecting, this book traces the rise of the modern Korean art market from its formative period in the 1870s through to its peak and subsequent decline in the 1930s. The discussion centres on the collecting … [Read More]
The Bird that Drinks Tears [forthcoming]
The Bird that Drinks Tears is a profoundly philosophical fantasy full of both tragically diabolical symmetries and laugh-out-loud hilarious moments. Four races with vastly different values, customs, and even lifespans come together to save their world, in which beings build their lives around honoring one goal, one promise, or one value above all else. Through … [Read More]
Being Korean, Becoming Japanese? Nationhood, Citizenship, and Resistance in Japan [forthcoming]
In Japan the number of “Special Permanent Residents”—most of whom are of Korean descent, the so-called “Zainichi”—is declining according to government statistics. Does this mean Koreans living in Japan are becoming Japanese? This volume presents a compelling sociological analysis of Korean colonial migrants’ and their descendants’ politics of self-identification and their ongoing struggle for social … [Read More]
Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea [forthcoming]
Anyone genuinely curious about what makes South Korean pop culture tick should look no further than Gangnam. Celebrated in a song by an unlikely K-pop superstar named Psy in 2012, Gangnam is the epicenter of Hallyu, the Korean Wave. It is an exclusive zone of privilege and wealth that has lured pop culture industries since the 1980s … [Read More]
Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment
Massive and sustained candlelight vigils in 2016–2017, the most significant citizen-led protests in the history of democratic South Korea, led to the impeachment and removal of then President Park Geun-hye. These protests took place in a South Korean media environment characterized by polarization and low public trust, and where conspiracy theories and false claims by … [Read More]
I Need Art: Reality Isn’t Enough
A memoir in images from the iconic South Korean Sally Rooney illustrator Everything I feel from reading and listening to music I commit to paper in black pen And gradually, blot by blot, stroke by stroke, A new mode of expression emerges. At this point, it’s just scribbles in a diary Not yet reborn as … [Read More]
Cultural Blending In Korean Death Rites: New Interpretive Approaches
Cultural Blending in Korean Death Rites examines the cultural encounter of Confucianism and Christianity with particular reference to death rites in Korea. As its overarching interpretive framework, this book employs the idea of the ‘total social phenomenon’, a concept first introduced by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950). From the perspective of the total social phenomenon, … [Read More]
Unusual Footnotes to the Korean War
A ‘forgotten war’ in modern history, the Korean War is rarely given much recognition or studied in detailed. In fact, it was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century, a deadly clash of world-views as the UN allied itself with South Korea against the massed ranks of North Korean armies backed by Communist … [Read More]
Korean Pansori as Voice Theatre: History, Theory, Practice
This book introduces readers to the historical, performative, and cultural context of pansori, a traditional Korean oral story-singing art. Written by a scholar-practitioner of the form, this study is structured in three parts and begins by introducing readers to the technical, aesthetic, and theoretical components of pansori, as well as the synthesis of vocal and … [Read More]
The Emplantation of Catholicism in Pre-modern Korea: Texts, Teachings and Gender Relations [forthcoming]
Tracing the development of Catholic ideas in Japan and China during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, this book provides an overview of the early emplantation of Catholicism in East Asia and the evolution of the missionary strategy. Kevin Cawley recreates the tumultuous period for gender relations and explores interreligious interactions between Confucians and … [Read More]