To celebrate the first anniversary of his death, a book of selected poems by the late Ku Sang (1919-2004) has been published by Seoul Selection in English translation. Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé at Sogang University, the book contains a total of 99 poems arranged not in chronological order, but under five major themes: … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 54)
Virtual Reality
From the translator’s website: Young-moo Kim was a professor of English literature who began to write poetry quite late. He published 3 volumes. We worked together on my early translations, then he developed lung cancer and died soon after the publication of his 3rd volume, mostly devoted to his illness and the time he spent … [Read More]
What the Spider Said
From the publisher’s website: This is a collection of short “epigrammatic” poems by Chang Soo Ko originally written in Korean. The narrator of the poems is conceived to be a “spider,” which to the poet’s mind represents a mystic observer with “spiderly” sense of humor. The poems were written with substantial attention to poetic vision … [Read More]
The Curse of Kim’s Daughters
Songsu Kim is orphaned when his father runs away from home and her mother takes poison. Raised by his uncle, he inherits the family pharmacy and later invests in a small fishing fleet. He marries Punshi of his uncle’s choosing and has five daughters, but curse is the undercurrent of their lives – the eldest … [Read More]
Chinatown (Modern Korean Short Stories)
According to Charles Montgomery this volume contains seven stories by Oh Jung-hee, including “the excellent Brass Mirror and as the only overlapping work [with the Jimoondang publication] is Chinatown it is probably worth getting both volumes.” [Read More]
War Trash
Publisher description: Ha Jin’s masterful new novel casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. In 1951 Yu Yuan, a scholarly and self-effacing clerical officer in Mao’s “volunteer” army, is taken prisoner south of the 38th Parallel. Because he … [Read More]
Panmunjom and Other Stories
Here for the first time in English is a selection of short stories representing over forty years of the creative output of one of South Korea’s most prominent contemporary writers. Born in what is now North Korea, Lee Ho-Chul makes use of an astonishing variety of literary styles to offer a panoramic view of the … [Read More]
Southerners, Northerners
Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when he was eighteen, Lee Ho-Chul was drafted into the North Korean army. Southerners, Northerners (Namny k saram pungny k saram) is a fictionalized account of his inglorious yet dramatic experiences as a raw recruit and, soon afterward, as a prisoner of war. Beginning with some fascinating … [Read More]
The Red Queen
From the publisher’s website: Set in 18th century Korea and the present day, Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen is a rich and atmospheric novel about love, and what it means to be remembered. 200 years after being plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, the Red Queen’s ghost decides to set the record straight … [Read More]
Tower of Ants (bilingual)
Prize-winning author In-ho Choi paints a dizzying portrait of what living in a modern, self-centered society entails in his breakthrough short story Tower of Ants. The plot centers around a young man who is going nowhere in his 9 to 5 advertising job when, one day, his apartment is suddenly infested with ants. The story … [Read More]
Twofold Song (bilingual)
Our lives are twofold in that they can be both lonely and not lonely. The whole world is twofold and it consists of men and women. When a man meets a woman, and together they create a oneness, it is called love. The infinite twofoldness of love, however, frustrates lovers who want to become and … [Read More]
A Walk In The Mountains (bilingual)
An apathetic husband and a wife’s slow awakening to a harsh reality share center stage in Seo Young-eun’s fascinating short story A Walk in the Mountains. Partly a post-modern detective story of a wife trying to find the cause of her husband’s disinclination to function in society, it is also a spiritual exploration that culminates … [Read More]
The Snowy Road (bilingual)
A poignant, radiant tale of a mother’s ceaseless devotion to her son, The Snowy Road is the story of a family that loses everything due to an older son’s abuse of alcohol. This tragedy does not shake the mother’s resolve to continue to work hard for her younger son, making his happiness the sole goal … [Read More]
Windflower
The poems in this volume are selected and translated from Moon Chung-hee’s poetry written over three decades. They are short lyrical pieces of poignant self-examination, evoking moments of bewilderment and hopeful resignation to the passage of time and imprisoning conditions of life. [Read More]
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry
From the publisher’s website: Korea’s modern poetry is filled with many different voices and styles, subjects and views, moves and countermoves, yet it still remains relatively unknown outside of Korea itself. This is in part because the Korean language, a rich medium for poetry, has been ranked among the most difficult for English speakers to … [Read More]
I Want to Hijack an Airplane
From the publisher’s website: The 103 poems in this volume by Kim Seung-hee cover a number of themes: sacredness of the life force, conditions of women, mother-daughter relationship, and husband-wife relationship. “Female Buddha” paints a vivid picture of a woman’s agony in the delivery room and the triumphant birth of a new life. In “The … [Read More]