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]
Archives: Books (page 147)
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]
The Long Road
The Long Road is a moving, elegiac short novel that examines the processes that caused idealistic young Koreans to depart for overseas during the 1990s in the wake of their experiences under Korea’s darker days of military dictatorship in the 1980s. The story centres on a trio of men: Han-Yeong, who although initially attracted to … [Read More]
A Moment’s Grace: Stories from Korea in Transition
A Moment’s Grace presents short stories that depict the core of Korea’s modernization, from Liberation in 1945 to the Seoul Olympics in 1988. The stories here provide a view of the process through the eyes of ordinary people as they were affected by the historical and social forces that formed modern Korea. A separate background … [Read More]
Diary of a Murderer, and other stories
Kim Byeongsu is losing his mind. Quite literally. He keeps forgetting the little things in life, like basic words, whether or not he has a dog, the last time he killed someone… In his prime, Byeongsu was one of the best murderers around, spending years obsessively trying to perfect his technique, only killing in the … [Read More]
I have the right to destroy myself
In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman – Se-yeon – who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he … [Read More]
I Hear Your Voice
In South Korea, underground motorcycle gangs attract society’s castoffs. They form groups of hundreds and speed wildly through cities at night. For Jae and Dongyu, two orphans, their motorcycles are a way of survival. Jae is born in a bathroom stall at the Seoul Express Bus Terminal. And Dongyu is born mute–unable to communicate with … [Read More]
Readymade Bodhisattva
Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction presents the first book-length English-language translation of science and speculative fiction from South Korea, bringing together 13 classic and contemporary stories from the 1960s through the 2010s. From the reimagining of an Asimovian robot inside the walls of a Buddhist temple and a postapocalyptic showdown … [Read More]
Black Flower
In 1904, as the Russo-Japanese War deepened, Asia was parceled out to rising powers and the Korean empire was annexed by Japan. Facing war and the loss of their nation, more than a thousand Koreans left their homes to seek possibility elsewhere—in unknown Mexico. After a long sea voyage, these emigrants—thieves and royals, priests and … [Read More]