A debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by award-winning South Korean poet and novelist Lim Solah. By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 40)
The Owl Cries
From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a slow-burning noir thriller with a touch of horror and the uncanny. A lawyer asking questions. A disappearance. And a vast forest in the mountains—the western woods—where the trees huddle close together, emanating a crushing darkness, while a chill dampness fills the air. The forester, Bak … [Read More]
Here Comes the Flood: Perspectives of Gender, Sexuality, and Stereotype in the Korean Wave
This collection breaks down the stereotypes often expected of Korean popular culture, specifically examining issues of gender, sexuality, and stereotype in a variety of cultural products including K-pop, K-drama, and cover dancing through the lens of how “Koreanness” can be defined. A diverse range of of contributors showcase how Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, began … [Read More]
Korean Film and Festivals: Global Transcultural Flows
This book examines the various film festivals where Korean cinema plays a significant role, both inside and outside of Korea, focusing on their history, structure and function, and analysis of successful festival films. Using Korean film festivals and Korean cinema at international film festivals as its primary lens, this interdisciplinary volume explores the shifting relationships … [Read More]
Ten Thousand Lives: Maninbo, Volumes 21–25
Born in 1933 in a small rural village in Korea’s North Cholla Province, Ko Un grew up in a Japanese-controlled land that was soon to experience the horrors of the Korean War. He became a Buddhist monk in 1952, and began writing in the late 1950s. Ten Thousand Lives is his major, ongoing work, which … [Read More]
While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America
The North Korean defector, human rights advocate, and bestselling author of In Order to Live sounds the alarm on the culture wars, identity politics, and authoritarian tendencies tearing America apart. After defecting from North Korea, Yeonmi Park found liberty and freedom in America. But she also found a chilling crackdown on self-expression and thought that … [Read More]
Nuclear Family
Set in the months leading up to the 2018 nuclear missile false alarm, a Korean American family living in Hawai’i faces the fallout of their eldest son’s attempt to run across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea in this “fresh, inventive, and at times, hilarious novel” (Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants). Things are … [Read More]
Indeterminate Inflorescence
“Poetry is the restoration of the whole through details. Think of it as making a sketch of a face only briefly seen. Just as one puts together a shattered skull or an earthenware pot, poetry is the creation of the pieces that go in the spots where the original pieces are missing.” Indeterminate Inflorescence is a … [Read More]
Counterweight
For fans of the worlds of Philip K. Dick, Squid Game and Severance: An absorbing tale of corporate intrigue, political unrest, unsolved mysteries, and the havoc wreaked by one company’s monomaniacal endeavor to build the world’s first space elevator — from one of South Korea’s most revered science fiction writers, whose identity remains unknown. On the fictional … [Read More]
dd’s Umbrella
What was it they were battling? Their smallness, of course, their smallness. A delicate and arresting queer novel from one of Korea’s most celebrated contemporary writers. d, a nonbinary gig worker living in Seoul, briefly escapes the grasp of isolation when they meet dd, only to be ensnared by grief when dd dies in a … [Read More]
The Master from Mountains and Fields: Prose Writings of Hwadam, Sŏ Kyŏngdŏk
The Master from Mountains and Fields is a fully annotated translation of the prose texts from the “collected works” of Sŏ Kyŏngdŏk (1489–1546), an influential Confucian scholar from the early Chosŏn period (1392-1910). A native of Songdo (also known as Kaesŏng) in present-day North Korea, Sŏ has loomed large in the Korean cultural imagination and appeared … [Read More]
North Korean Women in Power: Daughters of the Sun
North Korean Women in Power is the first field report on North Korea written by a South Korean woman reporter in English. Chun Su-jin, who refers to herself as a “Korean-Korean (South Korean nationality with a North Korean heritage),” introduces four North Korean women who make Chairman Kim Jong-un complete—the one and only blood to … [Read More]
South Korean Popular Culture in the Global Context: Beyond the Fandom
This book explores the recent landscape of Korean popular culture, including celebrity diplomacy, political activism, and inter-Korean relations in the era of ‘ontact’, with a special focus on K-pop and K-drama. Utilising the interdisciplinary approach, along with theoretical accounts, it redefines popular culture and its true power – beyond soft power – including discussions of … [Read More]
Korea: Outline of a Civilisation
This outline of Korea’s civilisation is a cultural history that examines the ways the Korean people over the past two millennia understood the world and viewed their place in society. In the traditional era, the interaction between several broad religious and philosophical traditions and social institutions, state interests and, at times, external pressures, provides the … [Read More]
Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Policy, Ideology, and Practice in the Preservation of East Asian Traditions
Focussing on music traditions, these essays explore the policy, ideology and practice of preservation and promotion of East Asian intangible cultural heritage. For the first time, Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan – states that were amongst the first to establish legislation and systems for indigenous traditions – are considered together. Calls to preserve the intangible … [Read More]
Presence Through Sound: Music and Place in East Asia
Presence Through Sound narrates and analyses, through a range of case studies on selected musics of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Tibet, some of the many ways in which music and ‘place’ intersect and are interwoven with meaning in East Asia. It explores how place is significant to the many contexts in which music is made … [Read More]