From the publisher’s website: Like many younger Korean poets, SHIM BO-SEON writes in an allusive, indirect style about topics that are in themselves familiar, eating rice, taking off clothes, living in an apartment block, struggling with human relationships. He captures some sparkling moments of joys and sorrows, hopes and frustrations that have been concealed in … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 32)
Vaseline Buddha
“If someone in the future asks in frustration, ‘What has Korean literature been up to?’ we can quietly hand them Vaseline Buddha.” — Pak Mingyu A tragicomic odyssey told through free association scrubs the depths of the human psyche to achieve a higher level of consciousness equal to Zen meditation. The story opens when our sleepless … [Read More]
Olympic Boulevard
Olympic Boulevard is a full-length novel by Philip Onho Lee that depicts the joys and sorrows of Korean immigrants in the United States. The story centers on a group of Koreans who emigrated in 1981 to build a new life and pursue the American Dream. Drawing on his experiences as a first-generation immigrant, Lee vividly … [Read More]
A Contrived World
Set in San Francisco, “A Most Contrived World” recounts the author s visit to the mythic Californian city. While the novel is based in this real experience, the narrator s imaginative reflections cause the narrative to balloon outward into the realms of fiction and fantasy. Each chance encounter provides an opportunity to unfurl a fictional … [Read More]
Score One for the Dancing Girl
Full title: Score One for the Dancing Girl, and Other Selections from the ‘Kimun Ch’onghwa’: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea From the publisher’s website: Score One for the Dancing Girl presents more than a hundred stories from an early-nineteenth-century collection of yadam stories, the Kimun ch’onghwa (“Compendium of Records of Hearsay”). Prose tales that … [Read More]
Poor Love Machine
For decades, Kim Hyesoon — a leading figure in contemporary Korean poetry and trans-national feminist literature — has represented the capabilities of a poet who works across, around, and through the borders of nations and of language itself. Many of her works have been translated, with overwhelming support from Don Mee Choi, into English. With … [Read More]
Night-Sky Checkerboard
From the publisher’s website: Oh Sae-young’s first English language release translated from the original Korean, Night-Sky Checkerboard, features heart-rendering, explorative poems fixated on existence and humanity’s scarring impact on nature through industrial society. Night-Sky Checkerboard introduces English-language readers to the imagistic lyricism of a Korean master at the peak of his powers. As a young poet … [Read More]
The Future of Silence – Fiction by Korean Women
These nine stories span half a century of contemporary writing in Korea (1970s–2010s), bringing together some of the most famous twentieth-century women writers with a new generation of young, bold voices. Their work explores a world not often seen in the West, taking us into the homes, families, lives and psyches of Korean women, men, … [Read More]
Hardly War
From the publisher’s website: Hardly War, Don Mee Choi’s major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi’s father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to … [Read More]
I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World
Kim Kyung Ju’s poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: “the living are born in the dead people’s world, and the dead are born in the living.” Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I AM A SEASON THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE WORLD is one of the most important … [Read More]
You For Me For You
As they attempt to flee the Best Nation in the World, North Korean sisters Minhee and Junhee are torn apart at the border. Each must race across time and space to be together again – navigating the perilous Land of the Free and the treacherous terrain of personal belief. Food has learned to sprint. Money … [Read More]
Request Line at Noon
From the publisher’s website: “We were friendly, Inconsiderate. Everyone moved forward to an end. You lost your love And I skipped rope. The surging music At the minimum altitude of my soul; The music from the “Request Line At Noon” We were always Flowing away regularly.…” —Lee Jangwook Translation by Sun Kim and Tsering Wangmo [Read More]
Cheer Up, Femme Fatale
From the publisher’s website: “In Kim Yideum‘s elegant and grotesque poetry, objective cool, violence and despairing megalomania all rage with the crystal-clear bitterness of vulnerability. When you read her beautiful, terrifying poems, you will go to pieces.” — Aase Berg “Kim Yi-Deum’s poetry is the landscape of confession. The confession flows inside the landscape and … [Read More]
The Colors of Dawn: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry
From the publisher’s website: Throughout the twentieth century, few countries in Asia suffered more from foreign occupation, civil war, and international military conflict than Korea. The Colors of Dawn brings together the moving and powerful voices of over forty Korean poets from these turbulent years. From 1903 to 1945, the Japanese Empire occupied the Korean … [Read More]
Human Acts
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of … [Read More]
The World’s Most Expensive Novel (K-Fiction 015)
When does life become art? How does life become art? Above all, I still don’t know an answer to the question why life should become art. I might be trying very hard to ignore the answer even though I know it. I still lack the thing called courage. But at least I have the courage … [Read More]