“Your husband is a landowner,” they told her. “Food and clothing is so plentiful, it grows on trees.” “You will be able to go to school.” Of the three lies the matchmaker told Willow before she left home as a picture bride in 1918, the third hurt the most. Never one to be deterred, Willow … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 15)
The Age of Doubt
The Age of Doubt collects some of Pak Kyongni’s most famous works, including her 1955 debut and other stories featuring characters that would appear in her 21-volume epic, Toji. Many of Pak’s stories reflect her own turbulent experiences during the period following the Korean war and the various South Korean dictatorships throughout the twentieth century. … [Read More]
The Apology
I exist now. Don’t tell me that I didn’t exist before. How should a nation apologise for the crimes of its past? Seoul, 1991. She kept her silence for over forty years. Then Sun-Hee spoke out, igniting a fire that burns to this day. Yuna is about to uncover a shameful family secret. Priyanka, the … [Read More]
Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works
In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” Her first book, the highly original postmodern text Dictee, is now an internationally studied work of autobiography. This volume, spanning the period between 1976 and … [Read More]
A Morning with only Writing Left (K-Poet 28)
I opened my eyes Rhodopsin had disintegrated. He wasn’t there and the candle was weeping alone. I missed him who had disappeared. Time transitioned into a story, and I saw the shadow of a moving tree outside the window and the feathers of a bird flapping its wings and flying from a branch. It was … [Read More]
Nearly All Happiness (K-Poet 27)
Holding hands, we walk along Banghak Stream. Wherever he points, I find a poem. On some days, taking the form of ducks; on others, taking after white-naped cranes. Black koi swirl the clear water like brush strokes, and therein lies another poem. A poem rippling. Scattering. Startling tiny minnows. Fleeing from grey herons. From“ Poet’s … [Read More]
Broken Summer
A death, a lie, a secret. For twenty-six summers he didn’t have the courage to face the past. Lee Hanjo is an artist at the peak of his fame, envied and celebrated. Then, on his forty-third birthday, he awakens to find that his devoted wife has disappeared, leaving behind a soon-to-be-published novel she’d secretly written … [Read More]
The Pachinko Parlour
The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between … [Read More]
Grotesque Weather and Good People
A debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by award-winning South Korean poet and novelist Lim Solah. By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world … [Read More]
The Sorcerer of Pyongyang
Growing up amid the starvation and oppression of 1990s North Korea, 10-year-old Cho Jun-su stumbles upon a mysterious game, left behind in a hotel room by a rare foreign visitor. As Jun-su painstakingly deciphers the rules of the game in secret, he unlocks an inner world that is at first an antidote and then a … [Read More]
Glory Hole
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]
Nuclear Family
Set in the months leading up to the 2018 nuclear missile false alarm, a Korean American family living in Hawai’i faces the fallout of their eldest son’s attempt to run across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea in this “fresh, inventive, and at times, hilarious novel” (Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants). Things are … [Read More]
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]
The Partition
Twenty-one years after the publication of his landmark debut collection Yellow, Don Lee returns to the short story form for his sixth book, The Partition. The Partition is an updated exploration of Asian American identity, this time with characters who are presumptive model minorities in the arts, academia, and media. Spanning decades, these nine novelistic stories traverse an … [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]