Publisher’s description: Although little known in the West, Kajiyama Toshiyuki was one of Japan’s most prolific and popular writers. Celebrated for his crisp, fast-paced style and incisive analysis, Kajiyama’s popularity may be attributed to his finely tuned sense of what many Japanese felt but could not articulate: the feeling of irreplaceable loss that lay beneath … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 119)
Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea
Publisher description: No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can … [Read More]
Dear Leader
Publisher description: Dear Leader contains astonishing new insights about North Korea which could only be revealed by someone working high up in the regime. It is also the gripping story of how a member of the inner circle of this enigmatic country became its most courageous, outspoken critic. Jang Jin-sung held one of the most senior … [Read More]
A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator’s Rise to Power
Publisher description: It opens with a double kidnapping . . . Madame Choi, South Korea’s most famous actress, is lured to Hong Kong, drugged and smuggled out on a ship. When her ex-husband, Shin Sang-Ok, Korea’s most acclaimed director, goes to look for her, he vanishes too. The pair wake to find themselves in North … [Read More]
Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema
Publisher description: Shin Sang-ok (1926–2006) was arguably the most important Korean filmmaker of the postwar era. Over seven decades, he directed or produced nearly 200 films, including A Flower in Hell (1958) and Pulgasari (1985) and his career took him from late-colonial Korea to postwar South and North Korea to Hollywood. Notoriously crossing over to the North in 1978, … [Read More]
Songs for “Great Leaders”: Ideology and Creativity in North Korean Music and Dance
Publisher description: Famously reclusive and secretive, North Korea can be seen as a theatre that projects itself through music and performance. The first book-length account of North Korean music and dance in any language other than Korean, Songs for “Great Leaders” pulls back the curtain on this theatre for the first time. Renowned ethnomusicologist Keith Howard moves … [Read More]
Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction
Publisher description: North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is firmly fixed in the Western imagination as a barbaric vestige of the Cold War, a “rogue” nation that refuses to abide by international norms. It is seen as belligerent and oppressive, a poor nation bent on depriving its citizens of their basic human … [Read More]
Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century
In December of 1997, the International Monetary Fund announced the largest bailout package in its history, aimed at stabilizing the South Korean economy in response to a credit and currency crisis of the same year. Vicious Circuits examines what it terms “Korea’s IMF Cinema,” the decade of cinema following that crisis, in order to think through the … [Read More]
Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier
Publisher description: Korean writers and filmmakers crossed literary and visual cultures in multilayered ways under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). Taking advantage of new modes and media that emerged in the early twentieth century, these artists sought subtle strategies for representing the realities of colonialism and global modernity. Theodore Hughes begins by unpacking the relations among … [Read More]
Life on the Edge of the DMZ
The author’s now celebrated quest, through narrative and photography, to capture today’s built and natural environment and way of life along the Min Tong Line (Demilitarized Zone – DMZ) separating the two Koreas, is both a stunning literary and photographic achievement. Supported by 150 colour photographs, the book by one of Korea’s renowned photographers who … [Read More]
Hamel’s Journal And A Description Of The Kingdom Of Korea 1653-1666
Publisher’s description: The first Western account of Korea is the story of a group of sailors shipwrecked on Cheju-do. Some thirteen years later, after escaping to Japan, Hamel gave the outside world a firsthand description of Korea, an almost unknown country until then. Dr. Jean-Paul, who is Dutch, has made the first translation based on … [Read More]
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea
Publisher description: Famously referred to as one of the “Axis of Evil” countries, North Korea remains one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. In early 2001 cartoonist Guy Delisle became one of the few Westerners to be allowed access to the fortress-like country. While living in the nation’s capital for … [Read More]
Seoul (Seoul Selection Guides)
Publisher description: Korea’s capital for the last 600 years, Seoul is an energetic, pulsating city where the ancient and modern coexist in dramatic contrast. With its grand royal palaces, quaint old alleyways, ancient temples, colorful markets, neon shopping districts, and verdant mountains, you’ll never run out of things to see and do. The most comprehensive … [Read More]
To Dream of Pigs: Travels in South and North Korea
Publisher description: The scariest place on earth.’ So said President Bill Clinton on his visit to the no-man’s land between South and North Korea in 1993. With the end of the Cold War in Europe, the minefields and barbed wire that divide the two Koreas constitute the jagged edge of world peace. If the world … [Read More]
Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
Publisher description: In the late 1980s, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester set out on foot to discover the Republic of Korea – from its southern tip to the North Korean border – in order to set the record straight about this enigmatic and elusive land. Fascinating for its vivid presentation of historical and geographic detail, … [Read More]
Meeting Mr Kim: Or How I Went to Korea and Learned to Love Kimchi
Publisher description: The world knows more about secret North Korea than the free society of the South. As a peace summit heralded a new era for a country divided for 50 years, Jennifer Barclay searched for the spirit of South Korea, discovering a land full of passion, tradition and spirituality, good humor, and great food. … [Read More]