From the publisher’s website: Chang-rae Lee, the bestselling and award-winning author of Native Speaker, Aloft, and My Year Abroad returns with his most ambitious novel yet-a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime. June Han was orphaned as a girl by the Korean War. Hector Brennan was a young GI … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 89)
Native Speaker
Description from Google Books: In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American–a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park’s harsh Korean … [Read More]
A Gesture Life
Franklin Hata, Korean by birth but raised in Japan, is an outsider in American society, but he embodies the values of the town he calls his own – he is polite and keeps himself to himself. Franklin deflects everyone with courtesy and impenetrable decorum, and becomes a respected elder of his small, prosperous American town. … [Read More]
The Interpreter
From the publisher’s website: Suzy Park is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean American interpreter for the New York City court system who makes a startling and ominous discovery about her family history that will send her on a chilling quest. Five years prior, her parents–hardworking greengrocers who forfeited personal happiness for their children’s gain–were brutally murdered in … [Read More]
Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
From the publisher’s website: In this autobiography, Richard E. Kim paints seven vivid scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence in Korea at the height of the Japanese occupation during WWII, 1932 to 1945. Taking its title from the grim fact that the occupiers forced the Koreans to renounce their own names and adopt Japanese … [Read More]
Fox Girl
From the US publisher’s website (Penguin Random House): Nora Okja Keller, the acclaimed author of Comfort Woman, tells the shocking story of a group of young people abandoned after the Korean War. At the center of the tale are two teenage girls—Hyun Jin and Sookie, a teenage prostitute kept by an American soldier—who form a makeshift … [Read More]
Comfort Woman
From the publisher’s website: Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut. Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two … [Read More]
The Red Queen
From the publisher’s website: Set in 18th century Korea and the present day, Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen is a rich and atmospheric novel about love, and what it means to be remembered. 200 years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen’s ghost decides to set the record straight … [Read More]
Never Ending Flower
From the dust jacket: Seven years ago, Susie Younger went to South Korea. She has lived there ever since and hopes to remain for the rest of her life. She paints most vivid pictures of this charming and little-known country and of its gay, patient, hard working and desperately poor people, whose life she shares. … [Read More]
Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons
From the publisher’s website: Cullen Thomas had a typical suburban upbringing. He was raised on Long Island, and after graduating from college he was looking for meaning and excitement. Possessed of a youthful, romantic view of the world, he left New York at age twenty-three and set off for a job teaching English in Seoul, … [Read More]
Korea and her Neighbours: A Narrative of Travel, with an Account of the Recent Vicissitudes and Present Position of the Country
From the back cover of the Pacific Basin Books edition (Kegan Paul, 1985): Isabella Bird’s account of her journeys in Korea in 1898 represents one of the very rare accounts of that country in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At that time Korea was virtually a forbidden land and had only been open … [Read More]
True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women
From the back cover: Between 100,000 and 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military between the early 1930s and 1945. Yet successive post-war Japanese governments have refused to acknowledge what took place and no reparations have been made to the mainly Korean victims. The international community, in awe of Japan’s economic … [Read More]
Rethinking Asia’s Economic Miracle: The Political Economy of War, Prosperity and Crisis
From the publisher’s website: In the new edition of this important contribution to understanding both the Asian economic miracle and the 1997-8 crisis, Richard Stubbs assesses the main explanations to date and updates the analysis to take account of globalization and the remarkable economic rise of China. Table of Contents Introduction The Old Order and … [Read More]
Big Business, Strong State: Collusion and Conflict in South Korean Development, 1960-1990
From the publisher’s website: Focuses on the paradox of development in the newly industrializing country of South Korea. This book debunks the rosy success story about South Korean economic development by analyzing how the state and businesses formed an alliance, while excluding labor, in order to attain economic development, and how these three entities were … [Read More]
Beyond Death: the politics of suicide and martyrdom in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Suicide and martyrdom are closely intertwined with Korean social and political processes. In this first book-length study of the evolving ideals of honorable death and martyrdom from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910) to contemporary South Korea, interdisciplinary essays explore the changing ways in which Korean historical agents have considered what constitutes a … [Read More]
From Elder to Ancestor: Old Age, Death and Inheritance in Modern Korea
From the publisher’s website: This insightful account of the treatment and provision for an ageing population in South Korea is based on intensive fieldwork in the county of Puan, and adds considerably to the literature in what is happening in the fusion between older Korean culture and modern Western individualism. The structure of the book … [Read More]