Publisher description: A Korea enthusiast commits himself to a week in Korea to attend the nation’s most solemn Confucian ceremony in honour of the Royal Ancestors, and to do some high-minded interviews with cultural figures to give him material for his London-based Korean culture website. Everyone tells him he will be bored out of his … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 120)
Baekdu-Daegan Trail: Hiking Korea’s Mountain Spine
Publisher description: The Baekdu-daegan chain of mountains forms the backbone of the Korean Peninsula. It has always occupied a very special place in the hearts of Koreans. More than just a series of rocky ranges, it is the source of the life and dynamic energy of the Korean people and shelters many of their cultural … [Read More]
Korea (Seoul Selection Guides)
Publisher description: With 5,000 years of history and culture packed into one very tight package, Korea is a fascinating travel destination that both compares and contrasts favourably with its larger neighbours. From the pulsating streets of Seoul to the peaceful temples and gardens of the Korean countryside, Korea is a study in contrasts—one foot in … [Read More]
Modern Far Eastern Stories
Publisher description: This anthology of carefully-selected modern stories offers the reader a glimpse into Far Eastern literature that has hitherto been largely unexplored. These stories by contemporary writers, which have been translated by specialists who mostly are or were faculty members of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, reveal the social … [Read More]
A Slow Walk through Jeong-dong
Publisher description: When most people travel, they try to cover too much and rush around cities and countries, ticking off boxes: Seen that, done that. Instead, you can have a rewarding time in a single place, not rushing around. Slow Walk through Jeong-dong shows you how to take things slow and focus your mind on the details. In this essay, … [Read More]
A Korean Odyssey: Island Hopping in Choppy Waters
From the publisher’s website: Michael Gibb embarks on an eccentric odyssey around the wind-swept islands off the coast of South Korea in search of life beyond K-pop, high-tech gadgetry and nuclear missile tests. With well over three thousand islands to choose from, there was no shortage of destinations, all connected by the indomitable ferries that ply … [Read More]
Korea Bug: The Best Of The Zine That Infected A Nation
Publisher description: Once upon a time, before there were blogs, there were zines. Like vinyl records, they were perhaps too cumbersome to really thrive in the digital age of instaconvenience, and yet for some, they remain a preferred choice, just as scientific research has proven conclusively that vinyl offers truer, superior sound to CDs or … [Read More]
The Novel in Transition: Gender and Literature in Early Colonial Korea
Having been marginalized from the literature-proper sphere of Confucian elite culture, the novel began to transform significantly at turn of the twentieth century in Korea. Selected novels in transformation that Jooyeon Rhee investigates in this book include both translated and creative historical novels, domestic novels, and crime novels, all of which were produced under the … [Read More]
Reflections from Prison: 20 Years and 20 Days
Reflections from Prison is a collection of letters and essays from renowned Korean thinker Shin Young-Bok written during his 20 years as a political prisoner under the military government. The letters range from post cards to tiny characters squeezed onto his Army Prison daily ration of two sheets of toilet paper. They provide a window not … [Read More]
Virtuous Women – Three Classic Korean Novels
The Three works translated in this volume are recognised as the most significant products of traditional Korean fiction. A Nine Cloud Dream is an allegorical romance about Buddhist and Confucian thought, written by Kim Man-jung, a scholar-statesman of the seventeenth century. It contains passages of both high and low comedy, as well as perceptive character-studies … [Read More]
Love in the Big City
A fresh and unique debut novel by the bestselling young star of Korean queer fiction. Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after. Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the … [Read More]
Cursed Bunny
Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society. Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose … [Read More]
Violets
We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation. … [Read More]
Korean Short Stories
Contains the following stories: Bare Hills (Kim Dong-in) Adada, the Idiot (Kye Yong-Muk) At the Time When the Buckwheat Blooms (Yi Hyo-Seok) The Third Human Type (An Su-gil) The Echo (O Yong-Su) Silent Parallel (Choi Bum-So) Illusion (Park Kyung-ni) Picture of a Sorceress (Kim Dong-ni) [Read More]
Trees on the Cliff: a novel of Korea and two stories
Hwang Sun-won (1915-2000) is one of modern Korea’s masters of narrative prose. Trees on a Slope (1960) is his most accomplished novel: one of the few Korean novels to describe in detail the physical and psychological horrors of the Korean War. It is an assured, forceful depiction of three young soldiers in the South Korean … [Read More]
Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk: Kŭmo sinhwa by Kim Sisŭp
One of the most important and celebrated works of premodern Korean prose fiction, Kŭmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle) is a collection of five tales of the strange artfully written in literary Chinese by Kim Sisŭp (1435–1493). Kim was a major intellectual and poet of the early Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897), and this book … [Read More]