The story takes place on a stairwell, all in about a minute’s time, while the narrator’s partner seizes her by the hair. The narrator had gotten caught, after running out of the apartment to try to escape assault. While she tries desperately to avoid falling down the stairs, she has a series of flashbacks about … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean literature in translation (page 18)
Five Preludes and a Fugue
A young woman delves into the circumstances of her mother’s death ahead of her own marriage, interrogating a woman who witnessed her mother’s death and would later come to play a crucial role in her life. An exploration of the human (in)capacity for (self-)deception and knowledge, the story offers a nuanced portrait of contemporary (Korean) … [Read More]
Old Wrestler
A retired wrestler struggles with amnesia and anxiety after he is invited to return to his home town for an event. Back in once-familiar surroundings, he wrestles to make sense of things as he is confronted by faces, scenes and smells recalled from a celebrated past. [Read More]
Demons
Set in a small rural village, seemingly everyday events take on a macabre meaning. We follow Kim Miyoung, a relatively new villager and the local primary school teacher, as she is slowly overcome by anxiety, with her daughter at the vulnerable young age of three, a difficult group of schoolboys under her wing and her … [Read More]
Divorce
A poet reflects on the lives of the different generations of women around her as she contemplates her own divorce from a socially-engaged photographer; her feelings are complicated by the ethics of public/private, art/life divisions, as well as the country’s contemporary history. The story reveals the raw complexity of gender dynamics in a society still … [Read More]
Bari’s Love Song
From the back cover: In her early career, Kang Eun-Gyo marked nihilism as the departure of her poetic imagination. In response to the turmoil of the world and modern Korean history full of violence and violations of human rights, the poet struggled to build her poetry in a house of nothingness. With Bari’s Love Song, … [Read More]
Chang-mo (K-Fiction 025)
As this is an Asia Publishers title, it’s pretty difficult to obtain outside of Korea. Text from the listing on Kyobo website, fed through the Papago translation engine: An inner crevice, a subtle look in between In April 2019, Woo Da-young’s “Changmo” was published as the 25th work of K-fiction. Woo Da-young began her work … [Read More]
Flowers of Mold and Other Stories
On the surface, Ha Seong-Nan’s stories seem pleasant enough, yet there’s always something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters’ lives. A woman meets her next-door neighbour and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A security guard falls in love with a magician/petty thief, and … [Read More]
Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?
From the publisher’s website: Kim Eon Hee was born in 1953 in Jinju, Gyeongsang Province. She is the author of five volumes of poetry. Her first collection Modern Ars Poetica was published in 1989. Followed by, Trunk, The Girl who Sleeps Under a Withering Cherry Tree, Unexpected Response, and her latest from 2016 The Man I Miss. First published in … [Read More]
Readymade Bodhisattva
Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction presents the first book-length English-language translation of science and speculative fiction from South Korea, bringing together 13 classic and contemporary stories from the 1960s through the 2010s. From the reimagining of an Asimovian robot inside the walls of a Buddhist temple and a postapocalyptic showdown … [Read More]
Diary of a Murderer, and other stories
Kim Byeongsu is losing his mind. Quite literally. He keeps forgetting the little things in life, like basic words, whether or not he has a dog, the last time he killed someone… In his prime, Byeongsu was one of the best murderers around, spending years obsessively trying to perfect his technique, only killing in the … [Read More]
The Rabbit’s Tale 2020
The Korean classical novel Rabbit’s Tale (kor. Toggijeon) tells the story of a Dragon King who falls ill, and learns that only the special properties found in a rabbit’s liver can make him well again. He sends a terrapin ashore to find the rabbit and trick him into coming to the Dragon Palace. The rabbit … [Read More]
Korea’s Premier Collection of Classical Literature: Selections from Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s Tongmunsŏn
From the publisher’s website: This is the first book in English to offer an extensive introduction to the Tongmunsŏn (Selections of Refined Literature of Korea)—the largest and most important Korean literary collection created prior to the twentieth century—as well as translations of essays from key chapters. The Tongmunsŏn was compiled in 1478 by Sŏ Kŏjŏng … [Read More]
Hysteria
Publisher description: Next to the burning police station I want to tear out my womb and kick it to heaven. Kim Yideum’s second collection to appear in English continues to evoke the grotesqueries of her first work, while simultaneously delving further into the materiality of everyday life. Through an overflowing that echoes fellow feminist poet … [Read More]
A Drink of Red Mirror
Publisher description: A hole walked in while I was removing my makeup I sat down on the couch and took off my pantyhose I looked at the hole A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon’s surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, … [Read More]
What Makes a City
What Makes a City? provides the reader with an intelligent perspective on the strange culture of our times and a series of adventures through which we explore universal human problems. Family, education, the media, popular culture, technology, alienation, financial power or the lack thereof . . . These are among the most prominent components of … [Read More]