From the publisher’s website: At nineteen, the idea that you have your whole life ahead of you with endless possibilities can leave you terrifyingly stiff. Throwing mobility to the wind, you dull yourself with booze. The grownups around you are stunted by their own failures so they act out—with alcohol, too, sometimes with violence. What … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 115)
A Cruelty Special to Our Species
From the publisher’s website: A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual labor in … [Read More]
Ordinary Misfortunes
From the publisher’s website: Korea continues to grapple with the shared memory of its Japanese and US occupations. The poems in Ordinary Misfortunes incorporate actual testimony about cruelty against vulnerable bodies—including the wianbu, euphemistically known as “comfort women” —as the poet seeks to find places where brutality is overcome through true human connections. [Read More]
Hope is Lonely
Kim Seung-Hee is regarded in her native Korea as being radically different from any other Korean poet, male or female, in her choice of themes and poetic expression as this selection from two of her recent collections demonstrates. Her poetry is strongly female and feminist, deeply personal, at times surreal, always humane. As John Kinsella … [Read More]
Lemon
‘A haunting literary crime story … Razor-sharp observations of class, gender and privilege in contemporary Korea’ Cosmopolitan In the summer of 2002, nineteen-year-old Kim Hae-on was murdered in what became known as the High School Beauty Murder. There were two suspects: Shin Jeongjun, who had a rock-solid alibi, and Han Manu, to whom no evidence could … [Read More]
A Drink of Red Mirror
Publisher description: A hole walked in while I was removing my makeup I sat down on the couch and took off my pantyhose I looked at the hole A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon’s surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, … [Read More]
Hysteria
Publisher description: Next to the burning police station I want to tear out my womb and kick it to heaven. Kim Yideum’s second collection to appear in English continues to evoke the grotesqueries of her first work, while simultaneously delving further into the materiality of everyday life. Through an overflowing that echoes fellow feminist poet … [Read More]
Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction: The Ventriloquists
Publisher description: Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction is a compilation of thirteen original essays which was first serialized in a quarterly issued by the National Institute of Korean Language, Saekukŏsaenghwal (Living our National Language Anew) in a column entitled, “Our Fiction, Our Language” between 2004 to 2007. Although the original intent of the Institute was to elucidate on … [Read More]
Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea
Publisher description: Two issues central to the transition from the Koryo to the Choson dynasty in fourteenth-century Korea were social differences in ruling elites and the decline of Buddhism, which had been the state religion. In this revisionist history, Juhn Ahn challenges the long-accepted Confucian critique that Buddhism had become so powerful and corrupt that … [Read More]
Azaleas: A Book of Poems
Publisher description: Available for the first time in English, Azaleas is a captivating collection of poems by a master of the early Korean modernist style. Published in 1925, Azaleas is the only collection Kim Sowol (1902-1934) produced during his brief life, yet he remains one of Korea’s most beloved and well-known poets. His work is a delightful and sophisticated … [Read More]
Everything Yearned For
Publisher description: Manhae (1879-1944), or Han Yongun, was a Korean Buddhist (Son) monk during the era of Japanese colonial occupation (1910-1945). Manhae is a political and cultural hero in Korea, and his works are studied by college students and school children alike. Everything Yearned For is a collection of 88 love poems, evocative of the … [Read More]
White Chrysanthemum
Publisher description: ‘Look for your sister after each dive. Never forget. If you see her, you are safe.’ Hana and her little sister Emi are part of an island community of haenyo, women who make their living from diving deep into the sea off the southernmost tip of Korea. One day Hana sees a Japanese soldier … [Read More]
Pachinko
Publisher description: Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a … [Read More]
Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung
Publisher description: ‘All my life my Stradivarius had been waiting for me, as I had been waiting for her . . .’ At 7 years old Min Kym was a prodigy, the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. At 11 she won her first international prize. She worked with many violins, waiting … [Read More]
A History of Korea
“A History of Korea” is a product of a particular moment in South Korean social and political history, published in the aftermath of the popular resistance movements of the late 1980s that brought an end to military dictatorship and ushered in direct elections for the presidency of South Korea. The historians of the Korean Historical … [Read More]
The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China
Publisher information: In May of 1592 Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi dispatched a gargantuan invasion army from Kyushu to Pusan on Korea’s southern tip. Its objective: to conquer Korea, then China and then the whole of Asia. The resulting seven years of fighting, known in Korea as imjin waeran, the “Imjin invasion,” after the year of … [Read More]