Publisher description: It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 22)
b, Book, and Me
Best friends b and Rang are all each other have. Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it’s painfully obvious they don’t. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly by the boys in baseball hats, b fends … [Read More]
The Black Room (K-Fiction 026)
As this is an Asia Publishers title, it’s pretty difficult to obtain outside of Korea. Text from the listing on the Kyobo website, fed through the Papago translation engine: 99 Years of Life, Unfinished Battle In January 2020, Jeong Ji-ah’s “Black Room” was published as the 26th installment of K-fiction. Jung Ji-ah was born in … [Read More]
The Only Child
A serial killer whose gruesome murders shook the world but who has steadfastly remained silent. Until now. A young, innocent looking stepdaughter from her husband’s previous marriage, who unexpectedly turns up at the door after the sudden death of her grandparents. Both are unsettling. Both are deeply troubled. And both seem to want something from … [Read More]
Untold Night and Day
A hypnotic, disorienting story of parallel lives unfolding over a day and a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul’s summer For two years, twenty-eight-year-old Kim Ayami has worked at Seoul’s only audio theatre for the blind. But now the theatre is shutting down and Ayami’s future is uncertain. Her last shift completed and the … [Read More]
Butterfly Sleep
From the publisher’s website: Kim Kyung Ju’s allegorical drama Butterfly Sleep refracts a critique of South Korea’s headlong development through a mixture of magic realism and absurdist dark humor set early in the Joseon dynasty. With lyricism and grace, Kim unfolds a lesson of consolation by confrontation, and finally reconciliation, with the ghosts of the … [Read More]
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River
A literary meandering into the mythology of place and what a novel can be, inspired by the author’s time spent at an artist residency in small-town Texas. In his inimitable, recursive, meditative style that reads like a comedic zen koan but contains universes, Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River recounts Korean cult writer’s Jung … [Read More]
I Gave the Sun a Long Look (K-Poet 10)
From the Kyobo website via Google Translate: The first Korean-English poet’s gaze covering all of Korea’s leading poets Lee Young-gwang’s new poem book I Gave the Sun a Long Look The ‘K-Poet’ series is intended to be distributed to the domestic and foreign markets after extracting the essence of Korean poetry that you always want … [Read More]
A Ghost Poet (K-Poet 09)
From the Kyobo bookstore website via Papago translate: The first Korean-English translation of a Korean poet A new collection of poems by poet Kim Joong-il “K-Poet” series, which aims to select the essence of Korean poetry and translate it into English and serve it to domestic and foreign markets. It represents the only Korean-English translation … [Read More]
The Catcher in the Loft
Inspired by the case of a torture specialist in 1980s South Korea who from 1988 to 2000 was a fugitive in his own house, The Catcher in the Loft (published in South Korea in 2011 as Saenggang) is in equal parts a portrait of a man coming to terms with his notorious past and a … [Read More]
Liking in Silence
From the publishers’ website: Kim Sa-in is a devotional poet who ably serves “all the unconsidered things in the world”–a cosmos flower, a turtle dove cooing near a firing range, the way a mourner offers a cup of wine to a widow. His eye for ordinary details that resonate in their new settings, his ability to … [Read More]
Poems from Korea: From the Earliest Era to the Present
From the publisher’s website: The Koreans, according to the Chinese chronicles, are ‘the people who enjoy singing and dancing’ and who regaled their gods with dance and song. Since then poetry has been an essential part of Korean life and has been regarded as the highest of the arts. In this first comprehensive anthology of … [Read More]
An embroidery sampler (K-Poet 08)
Text from the Kyobo bookstore and google translate: The first collection of poetry from Han-Young University, covering all of Korea’s leading poets Kim Jeong- hwan’s new poetry book An embroidery sampler The K-Poet series that draws the essence of Korean poetry that you always want to read at your bedside, translates it into English, and … [Read More]
Evening of the Whale (K-Poet 07)
Text from Kyobo bookstore and google translate: The first collection of poems from Han-Young University, covering all of Korea’s leading poets The K-Poet series that draws the essence of Korean poetry that you always want to read at your bedside, translates it into English, and distributes it to the domestic and international markets. The only … [Read More]
Wild Goose Dreams
Nanhee is a North Korean defector whose family was left behind in North Korea. Minsung is a South Korean goose father whose family has left him behind in South Korea. Nanhee and Minsung find each other on the internet. A story about modern aspirations and their betrayals, Wild Goose Dreams explores the miracle of quiet intimacy among … [Read More]
I Met Loh Kiwan
This captivating short novel follows the journey of North Korean refugee Loh Kiwan to a place where he doesn’t speak the language or understand the customs. Loh’s story of hardship and determination is gradually revealed in flashbacks by the narrator, Kim, a writer for a South Korean TV show, who learned about Loh from a … [Read More]