This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild―and to hatch … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 41)
No One Writes Back
Communication—or the lack thereof—is the subject of this sly update of the picaresque novel. No One Writes Back is the story of a young man who leaves home with only his blind dog, an MP3 player, and a book, traveling aimlessly for three years, from motel to motel, meeting people on the road. Rather than … [Read More]
Lonesome You
Well before her death in 2011, Park Wan-Suh had established herself as a canonical figure in Korean literature. Her work–often based upon her own personal experiences, and showing keen insight into divisive social issues from the Korean partition to the position of women in Korean society–has touched readers for over forty years. In this collection, … [Read More]
When Adam Opens His Eyes
First published in 1990, this is a sensational and highly controversial novel by one of Korea’s most electrifying contemporary authors. A preposterous coming-of-age story, melding sex, death, and high school in a manner reminiscent of some perverse collision between Georges Bataille and Beverly Cleary, the narrator of this book plows through contemporaneous Korean mores with … [Read More]
One Spoon on This Earth
An autobiographical novel that takes a life to pieces, “One Spoon on this Earth” stands a sort of digest of contemporary Korean history as it might be seen through the lens of one man’s life and opinions. [Read More]
A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories
Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung s stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or … [Read More]
Stingray
Hailed by critics, “Stingray” has been described by its author as “a critical biography of my loving mother.” With his father having abandoned his family for another woman, Se-young and his mother are forced to subsist on their own in the harsh environment of a small Korean farming village in the 1950s. Determined to wait … [Read More]
The Soil
A major, never before translated novel by the author of “Muj?ng / The Heartless”–often called the first modern Korean novel–“The Soil” tells the story of an idealist dedicating his life to helping the inhabitants of the rural community in which he was raised. Striving to influence the poor farmers of the time to improve their … [Read More]
The House with a Sunken Courtyard
An occasionally terrifying and always vivid portrayal of what it was like to live as a refugee immediately after the end of the Korean War. [Read More]
My Son’s Girlfriend
At once an ironic portrayal of contemporary Korea and an intimate exploration of heartache, alienation, and nostalgia, this collection of seven short stories has earned the author widespread critical acclaim. [Read More]
A Grand Retreat and Other Plays
From the publisher’s website: This selection of plays offers an overview of Lee Gun-sam’s attempts to portray the socially-underprivileged people’s ‘heroic’ struggle to assert their human dignity in a society swarming with time-serving snobs and hypocrites. Lee Gun-sam’s heartstring was always attached to those who remain honest to themselves and fight for their moral principles. … [Read More]
Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire
This volume brings together twelve short stories by colonial Korean proletarian writers, as well as two works written in 1946 under U.S. military occupation. The volume provides a diverse, ever-changing portrait of the complex movements of people and ideas that constituted both colonial Korea and the Japanese empire, adding the tumultuous experiences of those from … [Read More]
The Crane in the Clouds: Shijo: Korean Classical Poems in the Vernacular
From the publisher’s website: This anthology presents well over a hundred Korean classical poems known as shijo, in English translation. Shijo, a form of poetic composition still very much alive, has a tradition spanning a thousand years. One of the first historical anthologies of shijo in English, this book offers an overview of that uniquely … [Read More]
My Education
Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by … [Read More]
Brothers Under a Same Sky
Nam Kun and Nam Ki Han, brothers born on a Wahiawa sugar plantation, could not have been more different. Pragmatic and stubborn, Nam Kun dutifully supported his family but refused to become “one Christian fanatic” like his widowed mother and youngest sibling, Nam Ki. When Nam Ki is drafted into the army at the start … [Read More]
The Clowns
From the publisher’s website: 이 (爾) (The Clowns) by Kim Tae-woong premiered in 2000 and is today considered one of Korea’s most famous dramas. Awards include: Best Play by the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper; Best Production by the Organization of Korean Theaters, and Best Play by the Seoul Arts Festival. Mr. Kim was lauded as one … [Read More]