From the publisher’s website: Carefully selected and represented, the plays in this collection showcase both the fantastic and the realistic innovations of Korean dramatists during a time of rapid social and historical change. Stretching from 1962 to 2004, these seven works tackle major subjects, such as the close of the Choson dynasty and the aftermath … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean literature in translation (page 40)
Who Ate Up All the Shinga?
Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. … [Read More]
Land (Vols 1, 2 and 3)
Global Oriental is pleased to announce publication of the English translation of Part I (in three volumes) of Pak Kyung-ni’s Land (T’oji). Originally published in five parts, the work is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Korean literature and has achieved unprecedented popularity in Korea. The epic follows the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations … [Read More]
Tongue
An erotically charged, elegantly written novel that marks the first publication in English of author Kyung-Ran Jo, a literary star in Korea who has earned comparisons to Haruki Murakami. Emotionally raw and emphatically sensual, Tongue is the story of the demise of an obsessive romance and a woman’s culinary journey toward self-restoration and revenge. When … [Read More]
The Old Garden
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopian dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house … [Read More]
Unyŏng-jŏn: A Love Affair at the Royal Palace of Chosŏn Korea
From the publisher’s website: This early seventeenth-century novel follows the winding path of a secret love affair and the difficulties the court lady and the poet-scholar encounter in attempting to realize their romantic dreams. According to Pettid, “The novel holds all the elements needed for a truly captivating story: love, treachery, heartbreak, danger, and friendship.” … [Read More]
Scale and Stairs
From the publisher’s website: The poems of Heeduck Ra are charged with a friction between image and idea, sound and sense. She glimpses an arc, which may light a path from the visible world to the invisible. Her work occupies the ever-shifting border region between what we know and what we do not know, a … [Read More]
The Brush and the Sword: Kasa, Korean Classical Poems in Prose
Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Korean & Introduced with Commentaries & Notes by Sung-Il Lee. Sung-Il Lee lays before us samples of the great classical form of Korean poetry called Kasa, so sadly unknown to western readers along with any coherent knowledge of the country’s past and its culture. One will be so much better … [Read More]
What?: 108 ZEN Poems
Throughout his eventful life as a monk, poet, novelist, political dissident, husband, and father, Ko Un has remained a traveler on the Way. The poems in this collection, though strictly within the true Zen tradition, are as witty and down-to-earth as they are contemplative. Described by Allen Ginsberg as thought-stopping Koan-like mental firecrackers, the poems … [Read More]
Diary of a Vagabond
From the publisher’s website: Song Yong is not one of the more celebrated writers in Korea but more of an outsider looking in on the mainstream writing establishment in Korea. His work has never seen commercial success, nor it is well-known in Korea, although he is respected among prominent literary critics. The lack of interest … [Read More]
There a Petal Silently Falls: 3 stories
Ch’oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance. In this collection’s title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch’oe explores both the … [Read More]
My Sister Bongsoon
My Sister Bongsoon is an autobiographical novel. Through the eyes of Jiang, a precocious five-year old girl, the author relates how Bongsoon, a live-in maid who was uneducated, unloved but innocent and hard-working like most of the maids of those days, views the emerging new world of Korean reality. There is anguish, insight, but also … [Read More]
Aunt Suni
The Jeju Local Government has been trying to attract domestic and international attention to designate Jeju Island as World Peace Island. In this situation the top priority is to let people all over the world easily understand the people, culture and above all, recognize the tragic history of Jeju Island. The significant aspects of Jeju … [Read More]
The Dream of Things: Selected Poems of Hyonjong Chong
From the publisher’s website: The Dream of Things brings together about 80 poems by Hyonjong Chong that best illustrate his unusual poetic imagination and polished skill. In these poems, Chong demonstrates his persistent pursuit of the relationship between poet and object. It is through thoughtful meditation about language and meticulous precision in word choice that … [Read More]
Susaek
Susaek tells the story of a writer who, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, begins a search for his identity. As a child and encouraged by his family, Lee Su-Ho mistakenly believed that he was the child of his father’s mistress. When the mistress left, Su-Ho felt abandoned by both his real mother and … [Read More]
One Human Family and Other Stories
The devastating hold the Korean War still has on the ordinary citizens of South Korea is revealed here in a novella and four short stories. Although the war happened many years ago, old animosities remain, and elderly nursing home residents are traumatized by their belief that the new resident was a collaborator. A child is … [Read More]