From the publisher’s website: Chang-rae Lee, the bestselling and award-winning author of Native Speaker, Aloft, and My Year Abroad returns with his most ambitious novel yet-a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime. June Han was orphaned as a girl by the Korean War. Hector Brennan was a young GI … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 48)
A Moment’s Grace: Stories from Korea in Transition
A Moment’s Grace presents short stories that depict the core of Korea’s modernization, from Liberation in 1945 to the Seoul Olympics in 1988. The stories here provide a view of the process through the eyes of ordinary people as they were affected by the historical and social forces that formed modern Korea. A separate background … [Read More]
Walking on the Washing Line
From the publisher’s website: Kim Seung-Hee’s poetry is usually described in Korea as “feminist,” “subversive,” and “surrealist.” Most important is the way her poetic voices differ radically from any other Korean poet’s, male or female. Her work has sometimes found a readier acceptance among readers of the English translations than among Koreans reading the originals, … [Read More]
Questioning Minds
Available for the first time in English, the ten short stories by modern Korean women collected here touch in one way or another on issues related to gender and kinship politics. All of the protagonists are women who face personal crises or defining moments in their lives as gender-marked beings in a Confucian, patriarchal Korean … [Read More]
Prayer: Poems of Kim Je-hyun
From the publisher’s website: Kim Jehyun, a sijo poet, was born in 1939 in the city of Jangheung in Korea’s Southern Cholla Province. After graduating from Hongik University, he has devoted himself to poetry with an emphasis in the sijo. He first received notice at Chosun Ilbo’s 1960 Spring Literary Contest. Kim’s first collection of … [Read More]
Lost Souls: Stories
Publisher description: These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the … [Read More]
From Wonso Pond
A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English, From Wonso Pond transforms the love triangle between three protagonists into a revealing portrait of the living conditions that led to modern Korea, both North and South. In a plot … [Read More]
The Red Room
Publisher description: Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road … [Read More]
Modern Korean Drama: An Anthology
From the publisher’s website: Carefully selected and represented, the plays in this collection showcase both the fantastic and the realistic innovations of Korean dramatists during a time of rapid social and historical change. Stretching from 1962 to 2004, these seven works tackle major subjects, such as the close of the Choson dynasty and the aftermath … [Read More]
Who Ate Up All the Shinga?
Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. … [Read More]
Land (Vols 1, 2 and 3)
Global Oriental is pleased to announce publication of the English translation of Part I (in three volumes) of Pak Kyung-ni’s Land (T’oji). Originally published in five parts, the work is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Korean literature and has achieved unprecedented popularity in Korea. The epic follows the fortunes and misfortunes of several generations … [Read More]
Tongue
An erotically charged, elegantly written novel that marks the first publication in English of author Kyung-Ran Jo, a literary star in Korea who has earned comparisons to Haruki Murakami. Emotionally raw and emphatically sensual, Tongue is the story of the demise of an obsessive romance and a woman’s culinary journey toward self-restoration and revenge. When … [Read More]
The Old Garden
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopian dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house … [Read More]
Unyŏng-jŏn: A Love Affair at the Royal Palace of Chosŏn Korea
From the publisher’s website: This early seventeenth-century novel follows the winding path of a secret love affair and the difficulties the court lady and the poet-scholar encounter in attempting to realize their romantic dreams. According to Pettid, “The novel holds all the elements needed for a truly captivating story: love, treachery, heartbreak, danger, and friendship.” … [Read More]
Scale and Stairs
From the publisher’s website: The poems of Heeduck Ra are charged with a friction between image and idea, sound and sense. She glimpses an arc, which may light a path from the visible world to the invisible. Her work occupies the ever-shifting border region between what we know and what we do not know, a … [Read More]
The Brush and the Sword: Kasa, Korean Classical Poems in Prose
Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Korean & Introduced with Commentaries & Notes by Sung-Il Lee. Sung-Il Lee lays before us samples of the great classical form of Korean poetry called Kasa, so sadly unknown to western readers along with any coherent knowledge of the country’s past and its culture. One will be so much better … [Read More]