Uzupis (on the other side of the river) is, in reality, a neighborhood in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, which took the peculiar step of declaring itself an independent republic in 1997. In this novel, however, it is the lost homeland of a middle-aged man named Hal, who lands in Lithuania hoping to travel back … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 144)
The Good Son
Early one morning, twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell, and a phone call from his brother asking if everything’s all right at home – he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom … [Read More]
Suni Samchon (Bi-lingual, Vol 3 – Division)
Hyun Ki-young was born on Jeju Island in 1941 and graduated from Seoul National University. He has served as the Managing Director of the National Literary Writers Association and as the President of the Korean Arts & Culture Foundation (2003). Hyun was also the director of the Committee for the Investigation of the April 3rd … [Read More]
Dead Silence
A tragic – and largely forgotten – event following the liberation of Korea occurred on Jeju Island in 1948. An event now called “The Jeju Massacre”. On April 3, 1948, an armed guerrilla uprising was suppressed by the police and military constabulary. The guerrilla attacks had begun on April 1 and by April 3 the … [Read More]
The Moving Fortress
Hwang Sunwon’s The Moving Fortress (1972) is a panorama of Korea and Koreans coming to terms with the confrontation of tradition with modernity. Contemporary events, such as the demolition of a squatter neighborhood, as well as flashbacks to the Korean War, help to set the social and historical context of the novel. [Read More]
Trees on a Slope
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 … [Read More]
The Descendants of Cain
Hwang Sun-won, perhaps the most beloved and respected Korean writer of the 20th century, based this extraordinary novel on his own experiences in his North Korean home village between the end of World War II and the eve of the Korean War when Korea had been divided into North and South by its two “liberators” … [Read More]
My Sister Bongsoon
My Sister Bongsoon is an autobiographical novel. Through the eyes of Jiang, a precocious five-year old girl, the author relates how Bongsoon, a live-in maid who was uneducated, unloved but innocent and hard-working like most of the maids of those days, views the emerging new world of Korean reality. There is anguish, insight, but also … [Read More]
Our Happy Time
Already a wildly popular bestseller in South Korea, this gripping and passionate debut novel is a death row love story of crime, punishment, and forgiveness—vividly told by the exquisitely talented Gong Ji-young. Yu-Jung, beautiful, wealthy, and bright, is lying in her hospital bed, recovering from her third suicide attempt, when she receives a life-changing visit. … [Read More]
Who Ate Up All the Shinga?
Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. … [Read More]
Lonesome You
Well before her death in 2011, Park Wan-Suh had established herself as a canonical figure in Korean literature. Her work–often based upon her own personal experiences, and showing keen insight into divisive social issues from the Korean partition to the position of women in Korean society–has touched readers for over forty years. In this collection, … [Read More]
The Guest
Based on actual events, The Guest is a profound portrait of a divided people haunted by a painful past, and a generation’s search for reconciliation. During the Korean War, Hwanghae Province in North Korea was the setting of a gruesome fifty-two day massacre. In an act of collective amnesia the atrocities were attributed to American … [Read More]
The Voice of the Governor General and Other Stories of Modern Korea
From the publisher’s website: From the children of a dwarf whose house is torn down by the government to a young man selling his blood for money, the first-person narrators of the stories collected in The Voice of the Governor-General and Other Stories of Modern Korea take us into the heart of turbulent twentieth-century Korean … [Read More]
The Old Garden
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopian dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house … [Read More]
The Shadow of Arms
The Shadow Of Arms examines the phenomenon of an intrinsically capitalist war: looking to expand their imperialistic market control to include the rest of Southeast Asia, America’s ‘Vietnamese intervention’ was considered to be the quickest, most efficient means of achieving this end. In essence, the war itself was a kind of business being conducted on … [Read More]
Familiar Things
Seoul. On the outskirts of South Korea’s glittering metropolis is a place few people know about: a vast landfill site called Flower Island. Home to those driven from the city by poverty, is it here that 14-year-old Bugeye and his mother arrive, following his father’s internment in a government ‘re-education camp’. Living in a shack … [Read More]