Kang Kyeong-ae (1906-1944) was a Korean writer whose stories are remarkable for their rejection of colonialism, patriarchy, and ethnic nationalism during a period when such views were truly radical and dangerous. Born in what is now North Korea, Kang wrote all her fiction in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and witnessed the violence and daily … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 146)
The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
In 1989, a North Korean dissident writer, known to us only by the pseudonym Bandi, began to write a series of stories about life under Kim Il-sung’s totalitarian regime. Smuggled out of North Korea and set for publication around the world in 2017, The Accusation provides a unique and shocking window on this most secretive … [Read More]
Time in Gray (Bi-lingual, Vol 44 – Avant Garde)
“More than twenty years ago, for a short period, I was in love with a girl who was four years my senior and whose name was Su-mi. At the time I was going to an educational center that offered a course in Esperanto. There were two Americans in my class. One of them, Earl, was … [Read More]
Milena, Milena, Ecstatic
Yun’s meticulously ordered life of reading books and drinking coffee receives a jolt when a mysterious cultural foundation unexpectedly agrees to fund his film proposal: a blend of fiction and documentary, a tone-poem constructed around a lyrical narrative, set around Scythian graves in the High Altai mountains. Desperate to be taken on as his assistant, … [Read More]
Recitation
The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Recitation, a fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory by South Korea’s most prominent contemporary female author. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and … [Read More]
Nowhere to be Found
A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From … [Read More]
North Station
A writer struggles to come to terms with the death of her beloved mentor; the staging of an experimental play goes awry; time freezes for two lovers on a platform, waiting for the train that will take one of them away; a woman living in a foreign country discovers she has been issued the wrong … [Read More]
A Greater Music
Near the beginning of A Greater Music, the narrator, a young Korean writer, falls into an icy river in the Berlin suburbs, where she’s been house-sitting for her on-off boyfriend Joachim. This sets into motion a series of memories that move between the hazily defined present and the period three years ago when she first … [Read More]
Highway with Green Apples
Award-winning Korean writer Bae Suah tells the story of a young woman in search of meaning as she considers her fate in modern Seoul. For this aspiring artist, there seems to be no escape from life’s monotony. After leaving her family under the pretense of having fallen in love, she resigns herself to a solitary … [Read More]
Flowers of Mold and Other Stories
On the surface, Ha Seong-Nan’s stories seem pleasant enough, yet there’s always something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters’ lives. A woman meets her next-door neighbour and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A security guard falls in love with a magician/petty thief, and … [Read More]
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism … [Read More]
Human Acts
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of … [Read More]
The White Book
While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother’s arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with … [Read More]
Seopyeonje, the Southerners’ Songs
Sopyonje is a disturbing and haunting novel set in Korea s southern provinces and among the pansori singers, practitioners of the ancient storytelling art where blindness is seen to be an aid to creating pure art, being free of sensory distraction and temptation. A Song man causes his daughter blindness in order to keep her … [Read More]
No One Writes Back
Communication—or the lack thereof—is the subject of this sly update of the picaresque novel. No One Writes Back is the story of a young man who leaves home with only his blind dog, an MP3 player, and a book, traveling aimlessly for three years, from motel to motel, meeting people on the road. Rather than … [Read More]
Words of Farewell: Stories by Three Korean Women Writers
The universal topics of life, death, love, hate, sex, loss of innocence, and other themes, are explored in fiction by 3 Korean writers. LKL adds: the collection contains the following stories: Kang Sŏk-gyŏng: A Room in the Woods (1985) Kang Sŏk-gyŏng: Days and Dreams (1983) Kim Chi-wŏn: A Certain Beginning Kim Chi-wŏn: Lullaby Oh Jung-Hee: … [Read More]