With its unique style and heart warming stories, The Island has attracted widespread public attention since it was published in Korea in 1991. The bulk of the work recounts childhood memories and has its primary setting the authors island home. The Island is essentially a novel of remembrance. It is also a novel infused with … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 137)
Scenes from Ch’onggye Stream
Written in the 1930s, “Scenes from Ch’ǒnggye Stream” is a collage of the daily lives of ordinary people who live along Ch’onggy Stream, which courses through the centre of Seoul, Korea. The novel is divided into fifty chapters of differing lengths. It has neither a protagonist nor a plot but instead is a naturalistic description … [Read More]
The Jovian Sayings
“Even though they sailed across the vast emptiness in spaceships and lived under a strange sky, it is not that they changed their nature also.” Thus observes Miriam Hahn, a Ganymedean historian of the 29th century, reviewing the history of the colonial societies on the Jovian system, paraphrasing Horace. The Jovian Sayings is a part … [Read More]
Father and Son
Father and Son focuses on the age-old struggle between the generations within the context of modern industrialization and the battle for democratic freedoms in Korea. In this novel, Chu-ch’ol, a successful poet-publisher, is tormented by his son’s antigovernment activities and lack of filial respect, by the cynical questioning of a cousin-turned-government agent, and, not least, … [Read More]
A Floating City on the Water
A Floating City on the Water is a novel that carves in powerful relief how ideological division between South and North Korea wreaks tragic consequences upon a family for three generations. It is also a poignant story of incest between Sujin, an older sister born and raised in South Korea and Hansuk, a younger brother … [Read More]
Susaek
Susaek tells the story of a writer who, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, begins a search for his identity. As a child and encouraged by his family, Lee Su-Ho mistakenly believed that he was the child of his father’s mistress. When the mistress left, Su-Ho felt abandoned by both his real mother and … [Read More]
Farmers
The year is 1894, Korea’s Tonghak Uprising whose members are primarily poor farmers. In two farming villages, rumors circulate that the Tonghak army is approaching to punish the two local exploitative families. Counselor Kim is distraught over the report that Chang-soe, who left the village several years ago in the wake of a severe flogging … [Read More]
Olympic Boulevard
Olympic Boulevard is a full-length novel by Philip Onho Lee that depicts the joys and sorrows of Korean immigrants in the United States. The story centers on a group of Koreans who emigrated in 1981 to build a new life and pursue the American Dream. Drawing on his experiences as a first-generation immigrant, Lee vividly … [Read More]
Was that Mountain Really There?
From the publisher’s website: Was that Mountain Really there? by Park Wan-Suh, an award winning and well-known Korean novelist, has recently been translated by Hannah Kim and published by Kitaab. The novel depicts the trauma of partition faced by civilians in a war that reft Korea in two. Was that Mountain Really There? portrays the … [Read More]
The Scorpion
From the publisher’s website: In mainstream literature, it is not unusual to find a great novel whose themes are simultaneously universal and local. humanity and the human condition can be represented through characters and events that reflect the environment of an author living in a specific time and place. In the case of The Scorpion, … [Read More]
Human Decency
Gong Ji young is one of the best known of the new wave of women writers who broke into the South Korean literary establishment in the 1980s and 1990s. Her earlier works chronicle the 1980s and the students who like the author herself came of age during that decade of violent protest and political upheaval … [Read More]
A Grey Man
Choi In-hoon’s A Grey Man is a relentlessly realistic depiction of the dilemmas and disillusionments inherited by the generation of Korean intellectuals who came of age in the late 1950s, a generation born before the country was liberated from Japanese imperialism and who as adolescents endured the irrational obscenities of the Korean War. https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/node/9310 [Read More]
Wayfarer: New Fiction by Korean Women
The eight writers in Wayfarer are among Korea’s best known authors and bring an astonishing breadth of experience and style to the fiction collected here. They explore love and independence, break the bounds of family, are punished and resurgent. A powerful collection that strikes at the heart of what it means to be modern, to … [Read More]
Han Sorya and North Korean Literature (+ Jackals)
This first and only study of North Korean literary history by a Western scholar deals with the crucial role played by Han Sōrya, chairman of the DPRK’s Federation of Literature and Art from 1948 to his purge in 1962, both in devising the iconography of Kim Il Sung’s personality cult and in defining the early … [Read More]
What Makes a City
What Makes a City? provides the reader with an intelligent perspective on the strange culture of our times and a series of adventures through which we explore universal human problems. Family, education, the media, popular culture, technology, alienation, financial power or the lack thereof . . . These are among the most prominent components of … [Read More]
A Walk In The Mountains (bilingual)
An apathetic husband and a wife’s slow awakening to a harsh reality share center stage in Seo Young-eun’s fascinating short story A Walk in the Mountains. Partly a post-modern detective story of a wife trying to find the cause of her husband’s disinclination to function in society, it is also a spiritual exploration that culminates … [Read More]