The Rainy Spell, first published in 1978, is still rated as one of the finest short stories to deal with the Korean War experience. Because it was a war in which a homogeneous race slaughtered each other, the Korean War left a wound in the Korean psyche that is still not completely healed after half … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 58)
Everlasting Empire
From the publisher’s website: Everlasting Empire (영원한 제국) is a Korean historical novel written as a murder mystery. The narrator frames the main story with his “discovery” of a 150-year-old manuscript. Because of problems verifying the authenticity of the manuscript, the narrator offers the book not as genuine history but as a story. This compelling … [Read More]
Fox Girl
From the US publisher’s website (Penguin Random House): Nora Okja Keller, the acclaimed author of Comfort Woman, tells the shocking story of a group of young people abandoned after the Korean War. At the center of the tale are two teenage girls—Hyun Jin and Sookie, a teenage prostitute kept by an American soldier—who form a makeshift … [Read More]
The Cry Of The Magpies
“The Cry of the Magpies” is one of Kim, Dong-ni’s most famous and widely read short stories. From the depressing condition of life represented in the story by combining poverty, war, chronic illness, and hopelessness emerges various intensified forms of love, desire and longing. The cry of magpies, which is believed to foretell either the … [Read More]
A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball
A dwarf named Kim Bu-ri lives with his family in a poor neighborhood of Seoul. When the neighborhood is redeveloped by the government, Kim’s house is demolished. Author Cho Se-hui writes about the tragedies the family members face through the points of view of the dwarf’s three children. The work depicts the political oppression and … [Read More]
Appointment with my brother
An Appointment with My Brother is a story of the author’s imagined meeting with his stepbrother, his father’s son from his second marriage in North Korea after his defection during the Korean War. The narrator, the protagonist of the story, uses his connections and money to arrange his younger brother’s visit to Yenji, in the … [Read More]
The Ma Rok Biographies
The Ma Rok Biographies is representative of Seo, Giwon’s later historical fiction. Ma Rok, which stands for the various protagonists with the surname of Ma in this series of five short stories (of which only three are included here), actually means “the horse and the deer” in Chinese. This odd combination of the two animals … [Read More]
The Other Side of Dark Remembrance
The Other Side of Dark Remembrance was the winner of the 8th Annual Yi Sang Literature Prize in 1984. This novella falls into the fiction genre dealing with the division of North and South Korea. Stories of this genre often hold ideological conflicts and their ramifications at their center; rather than treating these issues upfront, … [Read More]
Strong Winds at Mishi Pass
From the publisher’s website: The first widely available translation in English of one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets. Dong-Gyu Hwang is recognized as one of the most important poets in contemporary South Korea. This volume draws work from three of his recent books and includes a number of his Wind Burial poems that haven’t … [Read More]
Three Days in That Autumn
Three Days in That Autumn is a novella that delves into the grim irony of women’s life-giving capacity. A gynecologist facing retirement must reckon with the legacy of her traumatic past. Herself a victim of a rape during the Korean War who had to undergo an abortion, the doctor devotes her career to freeing women … [Read More]
The Land of the Banished
The Land of the Banished is a heart-rending tale of a man torn and warped by the hardships of the Korean War period. Born into a landless peasant family, Mahn-seok becomes embroiled in the class struggle that descends upon his village with the onset of the war. From his rise through the ranks of the … [Read More]
The Wings
The three stories gathered in this volume display Yi Sang’s inventive manipulation of autobiographical elements, a method which expands his intensely private narratives into broader meditations on love, life, and death. “The Wings,” a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny … [Read More]
Yellow
Set in the fictional California coastal town of Rosarita Bay, a collection of stories features such characters as Annie Yun, whose passion for country music has her longing for a cowboy, ex-fisherman Alan Fujitani, stuck in romantic widowerhood, and the competitive “Oriental Hair Poets,” whose handcrafted chairs are museum pieces. “Elegant and engrossing…[an] unusually complete … [Read More]
Our Twisted Hero
When the twelve-year-old narrator of Our Twisted Hero moves to a small town and enrolls in the local school, he’s confident that his big city sophistication will establish him as a natural leader. He is shocked to find his new classmates and teacher under the spell of the class monitor. As the narrator sets out … [Read More]
Voices in Diversity: Poets from Postwar Korea
Voices in Diversity: Poets from Postwar Korea offers a selection of poems from 37 South Korean poets born in or after 1945, edited and translated by poet Ko Won. The selected poets represent the voice of a nation emerging from Japanese rule; they are witnesses to sweeping political, social and cultural developments who have distilled … [Read More]
Variations: Three Korean Poets
From the publisher’s website: This book showcases the work of three major Korean poets born at fourteen-year intervals, in 1921, 1935, and 1949. Each has tried to renew Korean poetry by bringing it into closer contact with everyday speech, social issues, and ordinary people’s lives. Kim Su-Young was a major pioneer, first developing as a … [Read More]