A ground-breaking new collection of queer poetry from a leading contemporary Korean poet. Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim’s fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean literature in translation (page 12)
Thinking Less about Sad Things (K-Poet 26)
Poet Dongman Moon’s Think Less of Sadness English version. Perhaps the world is a place full of sorrow, and no one can escape the sorrow that comes upon them. The upright will to live “eating deliciously / thinking less about sad things/like green beans” is permeated throughout the poetry, even if you can’t handle all … [Read More]
Following Birds (K-Poet 25)
An English version of Poet Chul Park’s collection of poems Follow the Birds. The poet, who has looked into the edge of his life, is quietly approaching the sick beings alone in this collection of poems. You can also meet the poet’s notes and essays that give a glimpse of the poet’s poetry. Souce: Info … [Read More]
Violets
We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation. … [Read More]
Concerning My Daughter
When a mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in … [Read More]
Korean Teachers
Winner of the Hankyoreh Literature Award, Seo Su-jin’s debut novel follows four Korean language lecturers at Seoul’s prestigious H University over the course of an academic year. Readers will spend one season with each of the four protagonists—Seon-yi in the spring, Mi-ju in the summer, Ga-eun in the autumn, and Han-hee in the winter—getting a … [Read More]
The Old Woman with the Knife
From the publisher’s website: The kinetic story of a sixty-five-year-old female assassin who faces an unexpected threat in the twilight of her career—this is an international bestseller and the English language debut from an award-winning South Korean author At sixty-five, Hornclaw is beginning to slow down. She lives modestly in a small apartment, with only her … [Read More]
The World You Want to See (K-Fiction 031)
To face the real in a world full of fake news. The novel is set in a world where smart devices called ‘agents’ have become commercially available. As the title of the novel suggests, the Agent is a device that delivers only the world that the user wants to see, whether it’s pure, glorified, or … [Read More]
Cold Candies
Cold Candies encapsulate the saccharine strangeness of a woman’s life. Fragments of narratives about girls, dolls, sisters, mothers, men, lizards, the moon, and pillows are brought together into otherworldly images that are devastating, yet familiar. Lee Young-ju is one of South Korea’s most original minds, and this collection, curated and translated by National Endowment of … [Read More]
I am the Subway
A cinematic journey through the Seoul subway that masterfully portrays the many unique lives we travel alongside whenever we take the train. A poetic translation of the bestselling Korean picture book. Accompanied by the constant, rumbling ba-dum ba-dum of its passage through the city, the subway has stories to tell. Between sunrise and sunset, it welcomes and … [Read More]
One Day
A gentle, delicately illustrated story about loss that has a cosmic dimension. A boy’s grandfather goes away suddenly, never to return. How could he leave so suddenly? His smell remains in his sweater, and his shoes are there to be worn. Plus, his friends at the fountain just saw him! The boy lingers in the … [Read More]
The Hellbound
One day, you will receive a message from an unknown sender. The message will only include your name, the fact that you are going to hell, and the time you have left to live. When the time counts down to zero, supernatural beings manifest to condemn you to hell. Amid social chaos and increasing hysteria, … [Read More]
You Have Reached the End of the Future (K-Poet 24)
This is the English version of a collection of poems by poet Hwang In-chan. Everyday scenes flow like a plain confession and become a piece of poetry. The trivial conversations, sometimes like jokes and sometimes meaningless, approach me coldly and honestly, and the more I think about them, the more I think there will be … [Read More]
Non-matter (K-Poet 23)
Poet Lee Hyeon-ho’s third collection of poetry. Scenes of love that are beautiful and therefore infinitely sad are endlessly reborn in the poet’s sentences. To a poet, love is a name that must be called endlessly without any choice, and when love is pronounced accurately at the tip of the poet’s tongue, the world will … [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]
Love in the Big City
A fresh and unique debut novel by the bestselling young star of Korean queer fiction. Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after. Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the … [Read More]