Snowy Day and Other Stories

The first story collection published in English by Lee Chang-dong, one of South Korea’s most celebrated and influential literary and cinematic figures.

Much like Lee Chang-dong’s internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally published in Korea in the 1980s and now translated into English for the first time, investigate themes of injustice, betrayal, and terror—on both an intimate and national scale. Lee writes deeply and hauntingly about conflicts between family, the powerful and the vulnerable, conformists and rebels.

In the title story, drawn from the author’s own memories of serving in the South Korean military, the class divide between a university-educated private and a working-class corporal serving sentry duty together one snowy night leads to tragic consequences. In “There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon,” the psychological violence that two brothers enact on each other over the course of a lifetime captures the darkness and paranoia that pervaded Korea in the 1980s, as the country struggled toward democratic rule. And in the novella-length “A Lamp in the Sky,” a young woman’s brutal interrogation at the hands of the police reveals the series of increasingly troubling decisions that led her to this moment. Is she innocent or guilty? In the end, even she cannot say.

Snowy Day and Other Stories introduces English readers to a master storyteller.

Source: publisher’s website

Wikipedia adds:

Lee’s first collection of short stories in English, Snowy Day & Other Stories … includes four short stories and three novellas taken from his two original Korean collections, There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon (1992) and Burning Paper (1987). In 2023, Lee’s short story, Snowy Day … was published in the March 6th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.

Contents

• Snowy Day
• Fire & Dust
• War Trophy
• The Leper
• There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon
• Burning Paper
• A Lamp in the Sky