According to Charles Montgomery this volume contains seven stories by Oh Jung-hee, including “the excellent Brass Mirror and as the only overlapping work [with the Jimoondang publication] is Chinatown it is probably worth getting both volumes.” [Read More]
Booklist: Korean literature in translation (page 45)
Panmunjom and Other Stories
Here for the first time in English is a selection of short stories representing over forty years of the creative output of one of South Korea’s most prominent contemporary writers. Born in what is now North Korea, Lee Ho-Chul makes use of an astonishing variety of literary styles to offer a panoramic view of the … [Read More]
Southerners, Northerners
Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when he was eighteen, Lee Ho-Chul was drafted into the North Korean army. Southerners, Northerners (Namny k saram pungny k saram) is a fictionalized account of his inglorious yet dramatic experiences as a raw recruit and, soon afterward, as a prisoner of war. Beginning with some fascinating … [Read More]
Tower of Ants (bilingual)
Prize-winning author In-ho Choi paints a dizzying portrait of what living in a modern, self-centered society entails in his breakthrough short story Tower of Ants. The plot centers around a young man who is going nowhere in his 9 to 5 advertising job when, one day, his apartment is suddenly infested with ants. The story … [Read More]
Twofold Song (bilingual)
Our lives are twofold in that they can be both lonely and not lonely. The whole world is twofold and it consists of men and women. When a man meets a woman, and together they create a oneness, it is called love. The infinite twofoldness of love, however, frustrates lovers who want to become and … [Read More]
A Walk In The Mountains (bilingual)
An apathetic husband and a wife’s slow awakening to a harsh reality share center stage in Seo Young-eun’s fascinating short story A Walk in the Mountains. Partly a post-modern detective story of a wife trying to find the cause of her husband’s disinclination to function in society, it is also a spiritual exploration that culminates … [Read More]
The Snowy Road (bilingual)
A poignant, radiant tale of a mother’s ceaseless devotion to her son, The Snowy Road is the story of a family that loses everything due to an older son’s abuse of alcohol. This tragedy does not shake the mother’s resolve to continue to work hard for her younger son, making his happiness the sole goal … [Read More]
Windflower
The poems in this volume are selected and translated from Moon Chung-hee’s poetry written over three decades. They are short lyrical pieces of poignant self-examination, evoking moments of bewilderment and hopeful resignation to the passage of time and imprisoning conditions of life. [Read More]
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry
From the publisher’s website: Korea’s modern poetry is filled with many different voices and styles, subjects and views, moves and countermoves, yet it still remains relatively unknown outside of Korea itself. This is in part because the Korean language, a rich medium for poetry, has been ranked among the most difficult for English speakers to … [Read More]
I Want to Hijack an Airplane
From the publisher’s website: The 103 poems in this volume by Kim Seung-hee cover a number of themes: sacredness of the life force, conditions of women, mother-daughter relationship, and husband-wife relationship. “Female Buddha” paints a vivid picture of a woman’s agony in the delivery room and the triumphant birth of a new life. In “The … [Read More]
Drawing Lines: Selected Poems of Moon Dok-su
From the publisher’s website: This selection of Moon Dok-su’s poems includes some eighty of his poems chosen from among a dozen different books and magazines. These poems cover a variety of subjects and show Moon’s perception of the world as well as his modernistic approach to poetic inspiration. He paints landscapes unseen in traditional Korean … [Read More]
Traveler Maps
From the University of Hawai’i Press website: Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Book of Poetry, Independent Book Publisher’s Association Many followers of Korean literature believe Ko Un—one of the country’s most revered and prolific writers—will be nominated for a Nobel Prize. Once a Buddhist monk, then a political dissident, and always a … [Read More]
Flowers in the Toilet Bowl
From the publisher’s website: This volume brings together 65 poems from Choi Seungho’s ten books that best illustrate his thought and art. In many of his poems, Choi portrays the rampant desires of the “hypnotized” man and the gray landscape of the late consumer society. Choi tries to expose the illusory nature of man’s desire … [Read More]
Even the Knots on Quince Trees Tell Tales
From Ku Sang’s obituary in The Independent: The volume Mogwa ongduriedo sayeoni itta (1984, translated as Even the Knots on Quince Trees Tell Tales, 2004) contains 100 poems evoking his life’s stumbling progress through the agonies of modern Korean history. LKL note: the volume is pretty impossible to find in hard copy. It looks like … [Read More]
Vision of a Phoenix
From the publisher’s website: The biography and writings of Ho Nansorhon (1563–1589), one of the finest poets of the entire Choson dynasty, who wrote during the Golden Age of Sino-Korean poetry. This period also witnessed the Confucianization of Korean society, when government-imposed sanctions greatly restricted the lives of Korean women, particularly those of the ruling … [Read More]
Mu-ga: The Ritual Songs of the Korean Mudangs
Introduced and Translated by Alan C. Heyman This work is mainly comprised of a translation into English of four complete large-scale Korean Shaman ritual songs transcribed from tape recordings, which, until the present time, have remained either entirely untranslated, or, if otherwise, are only quoted in the form of brief excerpts in a few short … [Read More]