From the publisher’s website: “The Wounded” is a compelling first-person narrative about two brothers—a doctor and a painter—marred by trauma. The older brother’s war trauma resurfaces when one of his patients unexpectedly dies during a routine operation He starts writing a novel set during the Korean War. The younger brother secretly reads the novel hoping … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 142)
The Prophet and Other Stories
From the publisher’s website: Yi Ch’ong-Jun was born in 1939 and graduated from the department of German language and literature at Seoul National University in 1966. He has long been recognized as one of Korea’s most prolific and demanding authors. Since his debut in 1965, he has enjoyed consistent critical and commercial success. His characters … [Read More]
Time to Eat Lobster: Contemporary Korean Stories on Memories of the Vietnam War
In his novellas Time to Eat Lobster and Forms of Being and the short story “Rice and Soup,” Bang Hyun-seok narrates the experiences of post-Cold War South Koreans and Vietnamese coming to terms with their own recent traumatic pasts at the same time as they form unusual bonds of love, friendship, and understanding. In this collection by a major … [Read More]
Marilyn and Me
Historical fiction, based on true events, about two women who seem the most unlikely to ever meet: Alice, a Korean war survivor and translator for the American forces in Seoul, and Marilyn Monroe, who is visiting Korea on a four-day USO tour. February 1954. Although the Korean War armistice was signed a year ago, most citizens of … [Read More]
The Investigation
Fukuoka Prison, 1944. Beyond the prison walls, the war rages. Inside, a man is found brutally murdered. What follows is a searing portrait of Korea before their civil war, and a testimony to the redemptive power of poetry. Watanabe Yuichi, a young guard with a passion for reading, is ordered to investigate a murder. The … [Read More]
The Plotters
Plotters are just pawns like us. A request comes in and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You think that if you go up there with a knife and stab the person at the … [Read More]
The Valley Nearby
Written by one of South Korea’s most popular authors, “The Valley Nearby”is a beautiful tale of a woman attempting to reconcile cultural tradition with her need for individuality and freedom. Living in the isolation of the country, Yun-hee is engaged in a solitary struggle. Her two worlds, that of a rural housewife and that of … [Read More]
A Distant and Beautiful Place
Somewhere on the periphery of Seoul, between the modern metropolis and the traditional farming communities, lies a “distant and beautiful place,” the neighborhood of Wonmi-dong. Here, a young couple from the city struggles to make a home for themselves; a hapless “salary man” is forced into door-to-door sales after losing his job; a precocious seven-year-old … [Read More]
Blood Sisters
Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980’s, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan’s violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh. Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a … [Read More]
Dust and other stories
Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story–and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as “one who went north,” Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not … [Read More]
Stingray
Hailed by critics, “Stingray” has been described by its author as “a critical biography of my loving mother.” With his father having abandoned his family for another woman, Se-young and his mother are forced to subsist on their own in the harsh environment of a small Korean farming village in the 1950s. Determined to wait … [Read More]
Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire
This volume brings together twelve short stories by colonial Korean proletarian writers, as well as two works written in 1946 under U.S. military occupation. The volume provides a diverse, ever-changing portrait of the complex movements of people and ideas that constituted both colonial Korea and the Japanese empire, adding the tumultuous experiences of those from … [Read More]
On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea
Collected here are translations into English of six classic stories from colonial Korea (1910-1945) as well as the time of liberation (1945-1948). Each piece takes a different perspective on a defining process in Korean history—the colonization and modernization under Japanese rule. The volume demonstrates the rich variety of registers, settings, styles, and thematic concerns that … [Read More]
Scenes from the Enlightenment
Scenes from the Enlightenment: A Novel of Manners was published in 1939, toward the end of the Japanese colonial period in Korea, and depicts seemingly trivial events in the lives of the residents of a small town northeast of Pyongyang: a wedding between two local families, the arrival of box upon box of fascinating new … [Read More]
Vaseline Buddha
“If someone in the future asks in frustration, ‘What has Korean literature been up to?’ we can quietly hand them Vaseline Buddha.” — Pak Mingyu A tragicomic odyssey told through free association scrubs the depths of the human psyche to achieve a higher level of consciousness equal to Zen meditation. The story opens when our sleepless … [Read More]
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River
A literary meandering into the mythology of place and what a novel can be, inspired by the author’s time spent at an artist residency in small-town Texas. In his inimitable, recursive, meditative style that reads like a comedic zen koan but contains universes, Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River recounts Korean cult writer’s Jung … [Read More]