A romantic thriller exploring the dark corners of human desire and isolation with quiet eeriness Is a fresh start truly possible? Or will society’s strictures and your own impulses keep re-creating the same messed-up relationships in every narrow room you enter? Choi Seongmin’s Narrow Rooms follows a young woman who leaves her rural hometown to study in … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 8)
The Pain Chasers [forthcoming]
International Booker Prize-shortlisted Bora Chung creates a remarkably fresh dystopia-within-a-utopia that explores the inextricable link between humanity and suffering. Kyobo bookstore synopsis run through Microsoft’s translation engine: A new work by author Bora Chung, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Cursed Bunny and shocked readers not only in Korea but also around the … [Read More]
On the Eve of Goodbye [forthcoming]
On the Eve of Goodbye is an unforgettable novel from one of Korea’s most loved authors, weaving together the lives of three artists to explore creativity and human connection. Set against key moments in history – the assassination of Park Chung Hee, Korean American immigration, a Korean artist’s life in Germany, and the global pandemic – … [Read More]
Project V
STEMinist mecha fantasy meets reality television in this high-stakes novel from the author of A Magical Girl Retires — a wildly imaginative tale of sibling bonds, unexpected friendship, and an existential quest to understand what it means to be human. Robotics student Kim Wooram, runner-up at the World Gigantic Mechanics Olympiad, is a world-class pilot and … [Read More]
Migration and Cross-Border Marriage in South Korea: Brokering Nationhood and Wifehood
Rather than treating them as logistical intermediaries, this book reconceptualizes the role of cross-border marriage brokers in South Korea, facilitating mobility while also helping to shape narratives around gender, family, and national belonging in contemporary Asia. Drawing on multi-sited, qualitative research – including discourse analysis of brokers’ online videos, interviews, fieldwork at an NGO, and … [Read More]
State, Rural Women, and Domestication in Korea: The Aspiring Middle Class
This book explores the dynamic interactions between the state and society during the industrialization of South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on rural women as a marginalized social group. By illuminating rural women’s interactions with the state and their aspirations for entering the middle class, it effectively reveals insights into the gender and … [Read More]
The Cultural Diplomacy of South Korea: Exhibiting the Nation in International Museums
This book explores the role played by museums and museum exhibitions in South Korea’s cultural diplomacy and international projection of itself to the world. Based on extensive archival research and fieldwork in cultural diplomatic institutions across South Korea, Britain and the United States, this book charts the important role played by this form of cultural … [Read More]
Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War
In Brutal Fantasies, Christine Kim examines how Western cultural representations of North Korea depend on fantasies of the inhuman. Drawing on films, fiction, and defectors’ life writings from the last two decades, Kim analyzes how these representations construct North Korea as a site of brutality and inhumanity. She recasts these stories through Asian American and … [Read More]
Korean Temples: The Weird and Wonderful
There are over 12,000 temples that dot the Korean peninsula. Having traveled extensively throughout South Korea, Dale Quarrington selects thirty of the most unique Korean Buddhist temples. Whether it’s the artwork, architecture, or geography that makes the temple either weird or wonderful, Dale Quarrington helps to shed some light on these amazingly eccentric locations. Source: … [Read More]
Flashlight
The astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of the twentieth century, ranging from post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, … [Read More]
Trust Exercise
Both inventive and shocking, Trust Exercise became a sensation on publication in the USA for its timely insights into sex, power and the nature of abuse. Sarah and David are in love – the obsessive, uncertain love of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. At their performing arts school, the rules are made by their magnetic drama … [Read More]
My Education
Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by … [Read More]
A Person of Interest
Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician near retirement age would seem the last person to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee must endure the undermining power of suspicion and face the ghosts of his past. With its propulsive drive, vividly realized characters, and … [Read More]
American Woman
On the run for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity … [Read More]
The Foreign Student
A young Korean man scarred by war finds unlikely love in the American South in National Book Award–winning author Susan Choi’s acclaimed debut novel. Tennessee, 1955. When Chuck Ahn arrives in Sewanee to begin his studies at the University of the South, he is shy and speaks English haltingly. On the subject of his earlier … [Read More]
North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding
We are told, time and again, that North Koreans are loyal to their leader, that they would do anything, even die for him, and that they are fiercely proud and nationalistic. But to an equal extent, we are told that they are oppressed, suffering, and ready to rise against the evil dictator. What do we … [Read More]