A sweeping account of imprisonment—in time, in language, and in a divided country—from Korea’s most acclaimed novelist In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center. Hwang’s imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject—of thought, of writing, of Cold War … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 139)
Nobody Checks the Time When They’re Happy
No One Checks the Time When They’re Happy is a collection of stories, by turns sad and funny, about the thwarted expectations of the young as they grow older. Eun Heeyung’s characters are misfits who, by virtue of their bodies or their lack of social status, are left to dream of momentous changes that will … [Read More]
Another Man’s City
Through a series of seemingly minor juxtapositions of the familiar and the strange, K, the protagonist of Another Man’s City, gradually realizes he is inside a Matrix-like reality, populated by shape-shifting characters, and is living a virtual-reality narrative manipulated by an entity referred to as both the “Invisible Hand” and “Big Brother.” From mundane and … [Read More]
Beauty Looks Down on Me
Beauty Looks Down On Me is a collection of by turns sad and funny stories about the thwarted expectations of the young as they grow older. Eun Hee-kyung’s characters are misfits who by virtue of their bodies or their lack of social status are left to dream of momentous changes that will never come. Unsatisfied … [Read More]
God Has No Grandchildren
The nine stories that make up this collection depict a wide variety of contemporary Koreans navigating a world focused on material wealth and social power, in which family ties have been disrupted and all relationships are dysfunctional. Unpredictable and enigmatic, these tales, though taking place in what would appear to be a shallow, materialistic environment, … [Read More]
Rina
Rina is a defector from a country that might be North Korea, traversing an “empty and futile” landscape. Along the way, she is forced to work at a chemical plant, murders a few people, becomes a prostitute, runs a lucrative bar, and finds a solace in a motley family of wanderers all as disenfranchised as … [Read More]
And So Flows History
From the publisher’s website: A deeply compelling saga of love, jealously, honor, and greed, And So Flows History (역사는 흐른다, 1947) depicts the relentless power of exterior forces on the individual lives of three generations of the illustrious Cho family–from the waning years of the Choson dynasty in the late nineteenth century to the tumultuous … [Read More]
Everlasting Empire
From the publisher’s website: Everlasting Empire (영원한 제국) is a Korean historical novel written as a murder mystery. The narrator frames the main story with his “discovery” of a 150-year-old manuscript. Because of problems verifying the authenticity of the manuscript, the narrator offers the book not as genuine history but as a story. This compelling … [Read More]
Silvery World and Other Stories
From the publisher’s website: This anthology is an exciting new collection of Korean fiction in translation from the early years of the twentieth century that demonstrate the political and ideological divides that Koreans experienced during this time. Contains the following stories: Cho Myŏng-hŭi : Naktong River tr Bro. Anthony of Taize Ch’oe Chansik: The Shore … [Read More]
Toy City
Toy City is a poignant coming-of-age story of a fourth-grade boy named Yun, depicting the life of a poor family struggling to survive in the years immediately after the Korean War. An autobiographical work, the novel is written entirely from young Yun’s point of view. Alternately heart-wrenching and hopeful, this masterpiece of Korean literature is … [Read More]
Deep Blue Night
Better known as a novelist, Choe In-ho has also written strikingly original shorter fictions, of which the stories reprinted here are good examples. “Deep Blue Night” is an autobiographical story that is both contemporary in being structured about a highway journey and yet traditional in its themes of exile, wandering, and retrospection. Of interest to … [Read More]
On the Origin of Species and Other Stories
The debut English-language collection of one of South Korea’s most distinctive and accomplished sci-fi authors Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time … [Read More]
The Muslim Butcher
Several decades after the Korean War, the unnamed narrator of this story is taken in by an aged Turk, Uncle Hassan, a veteran of that conflict who makes a living as a butcher in a Seoul slum. The precocious narrator, a troubled boy, wonders who his parents are and why they abandoned him. He befriends … [Read More]
The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories
This anthology of short stories reflects the writers’ shared core experience of Korea’s trajectory from an inward-looking feudal state, through Japanese colony and battle-ground for the Korean War, to a modernizing society. Three stories have been added to the original edition. Ch’ae Man-Sik: My Idiot Uncle Ch’oe In-hun: My Idol’s Abode Ch’oe Yun: His Father’s … [Read More]
A Sketch of the Fading Sun
A vast number of Korean literary works have been written dealing with man-woman relationships. Notwithstanding, there has rarely been much written that has grasped, much less challenged, the relationship between man and woman as being one of oppression. As Wan-suh Park notes, it would be safe to say that most writing considered as literature beautifies … [Read More]
Tower of Ants (bilingual)
Prize-winning author In-ho Choi paints a dizzying portrait of what living in a modern, self-centered society entails in his breakthrough short story Tower of Ants. The plot centers around a young man who is going nowhere in his 9 to 5 advertising job when, one day, his apartment is suddenly infested with ants. The story … [Read More]