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]
Archives: Books (page 146)
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]
How in Heaven’s Name
How in Heaven’s Name is a microcosm of the uprooting and dislocation that have characterized much of modern Korean and East Asian history. It is based on the true story of several Korean youths who in the late 1930s were lured into the Japanese Imperial Army either through promises by the Japanese colonial overlords of … [Read More]
Turbid River
Turbid River was written just before Ch’ae Man-Sik was arrested in 1938 by the Japanese colonial government. Like the two novels that followed (Peace Under Heaven and Frozen Fish), Turbid River is a realistic portrayal of life in Korea under Japanese colonization. The tragic story of a woman’s life, the novel is also a penetrating … [Read More]
White Badge: A Novel of Korea
Han Kiju is an executive in modern Seoul, a Korean intellectual who has never adjusted to his postwar existence. When an old comrade-in-arms, a coward who crumpled in battle, begins to follow him, Han Kiju must finally deal with the ghosts of the past haunting his present. [Read More]
Silver Stallion
In a mountain village in Korea, 1950, the memory of the Japanese occupation has just begun to fade when the farmers hear that the World Army, led by the great American General “Megado” has landed at Inchon. [Read More]
The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher
The life of the salmon is a predictable one: swimming upstream to the place of its birth to spawn, and then to die. This is the story of a salmon whose silver scales mark him out as different – who dares to leap beyond his fate. It’s a story about growing up, and about aching … [Read More]
Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology
To represent the past century of Korean fiction, this definitive collection extends beyond familiar writers, challenges cultural norms, and crosses political borders. By including stories from neglected female, North Korean, and wolbuk writers (those who migrated to the North after 1945 and whose works were widely banned in South Korea) and by bringing politically engaged … [Read More]
Unspoken Voices: Selected Short Stories by Korean Women Writers
The stories in this collection are written by twelve Korean women writers whose experience, insight, and writing skill make them truly representative of Korean fiction at its best. “The Rooster” is a comical revelation of an old man who accepts the truth that Man and Nature revolve around the same immutable natural law. In “The … [Read More]
Lost Souls: Stories
Publisher description: These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the … [Read More]
Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader
Ch’ae Manshik is one of the most accomplished modern Korean writers yet is underrepresented in English translation because of the challenges posed by his distinctive voice and colloquial style. Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader is the first English-language anthology of his works and features a variety of genres—novella, short fiction, anecdotal essay, travel writing, children’s … [Read More]