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]
Archives: Books (page 145)
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]
Princess Bari
In a drab North Korean city, a seventh daughter is born to a couple longing for a son. Abandoned hours after her birth, she is eventually rescued by her grandmother. The old woman names the child Bari, after a legend telling of a forsaken princess who undertakes a quest for an elixir that will bring … [Read More]
At Dusk
Park Minwoo is, by every measure, a success story. Born into poverty in a miserable neighbourhood of Seoul, he has ridden the wave of development in a rapidly modernising society. Now the director of a large architectural firm, his hard work and ambition have brought him triumph and satisfaction. But when his company is investigated … [Read More]
There a Petal Silently Falls: 3 stories
Ch’oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance. In this collection’s title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch’oe explores both the … [Read More]
The Dwarf
The dark side of South Korea’s “economic miracle” emerges in The Dwarf, Cho Se-hui’s enormously popular and critically acclaimed work. First published in 1978, it speaks to the painful social costs of reckless industrialization, even as it tellingly portrays the spiritual malaise of the newly rich and powerful and a working class subject to forces … [Read More]
Modern Family
Forty-year-old In-mo, a movie director who’s been jobless for the past decade decides to move in with his widowed mother. His older brother, with five criminal convictions, has already moved back. Then younger sister Mi-yeon arrives with her bratty, rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter. Mom is delighted to have her entire dysfunctional family back again, but what … [Read More]
Peace Under Heaven
Originally published in Seoul in 1938, soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, “Peace Under Heaven” is a satirical novel centering on the household of a Korean landlord during the Japanese colonial occupation. Master Yun, embodying the traditional ambitions of a standard Korean paterfamilias, by being projected fast forward into a modern urban environment, … [Read More]
From Wonso Pond
A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English, From Wonso Pond transforms the love triangle between three protagonists into a revealing portrait of the living conditions that led to modern Korea, both North and South. In a plot … [Read More]