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]
Archives: Books (page 143)
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]
A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories
Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung s stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or … [Read More]
Arriving in a Thick Fog
The four novellas in Arriving in a Thick Fog typify renowned Korean cult writer Jung Young Moon’s emphasis not on events, but on the meticulous and convoluted paths the narrator’s minds take as they navigate through life. Through a deep, filterless gaze into the narrator’s heads, Jung shares thorough musings that manage to be both spontaneous and … [Read More]
A Contrived World
Set in San Francisco, “A Most Contrived World” recounts the author s visit to the mythic Californian city. While the novel is based in this real experience, the narrator s imaginative reflections cause the narrative to balloon outward into the realms of fiction and fantasy. Each chance encounter provides an opportunity to unfurl a fictional … [Read More]
A Chain of Dark Tales
A Chain of Dark Tales contains forty-five short stories. The phrase that most accurately describes this book would be The Great Quilt, a panoramic quilt with all possible, even impossible, thoughts and images and situations. Its as if he has laid out forty-five patches of unique materials, patterns, and colors in a public square and … [Read More]
Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea
Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905-1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber … [Read More]
One Spoon on This Earth
An autobiographical novel that takes a life to pieces, “One Spoon on this Earth” stands a sort of digest of contemporary Korean history as it might be seen through the lens of one man’s life and opinions. [Read More]
Tongue
An erotically charged, elegantly written novel that marks the first publication in English of author Kyung-Ran Jo, a literary star in Korea who has earned comparisons to Haruki Murakami. Emotionally raw and emphatically sensual, Tongue is the story of the demise of an obsessive romance and a woman’s culinary journey toward self-restoration and revenge. When … [Read More]