Negotiating the terrain of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, a brilliant, haunting speculative novel from a #1 New York Times bestselling translator that sets out to answer the question: What does it mean to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology? In a near-future world, … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature Fiction and Poetry (page 9)
The Melancholy of Untold History
A beautifully crafted, enriching saga inspired by East Asian mythology, The Melancholy of Untold History is Minsoo Kang’s debut novel, steeped in history like R.F. Kuang’s Babel, epic in scope like Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, and lyrically exciting like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, interweaving four complex yet entertaining stories as they shape and create a nation’s literary narrative through … [Read More]
The Eyes Are The Best Part
My Sister, the Serial Killer meets Boy Parts, this literary feminist howl-of-a-debut is going to crawl right under your skin… Ji-won’s life is in disarray. Her father’s affair has ripped her family to shreds, leaving her to piece their crappy lives back together. So, when her mother’s obnoxious new white boyfriend enters the scene, bragging … [Read More]
Song of Arirang: The Story of a Korean Rebel Revolutionary in China
Song of Arirang tells the true story of Korean revolutionary Kim San (Jang Jirak), who left colonized Korea as a teenager to fight against Japanese imperialism and fought alongside Mao’s Red Army during the Chinese Revolution. First published in 1941, this remarkably intimate memoir (as told to the American journalist Nym Wales aka Helen Foster … [Read More]
Years and Years
Three women—the old mother and her two daughters—contemplate their family life and their bottled-up feelings through the novel’s placating yet oddly unnerving prose. Years and Years is divided into four large chapters; the first unravels from the perspective of Sejin, younger daughter, the second from that of Youngjin, older daughter, the third from the mother’s, … [Read More]
Rina
Rina is a defector from a country that might be North Korea, traversing an “empty and futile” landscape. Along the way, she is forced to work at a chemical plant, murders a few people, becomes a prostitute, runs a lucrative bar, and finds a solace in a motley family of wanderers all as disenfranchised as … [Read More]
Grocery List
In Grocery List, the Korean writer Bora Chung reimagines the ghost story as a chilling tale of intimacy with appetite. The dividing lines of reality and thoughtforms blur as Chung takes on the ever-timely subject of food consciousness. Cutting and evocative, Grocery List is a feast for eaters of all kinds. Born in Seoul, Bora Chung is a distinct new … [Read More]
A Magical Girl Retires
A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga. Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge. But … [Read More]
Wafers
This 2006 collection of short stories is in line with the unsettling, engrossing style of Ha’s other two collections that have been translated into English, the critical and commercial successes Flowers of Mold and Bluebeard’s First Wife. A best-seller in Korea, Ha Seong-nan is one of the stars of contemporary short fiction, writing edgy, socially conscious stories that … [Read More]
Plastic Rice
A warm, hearty bowl of rice made lovingly for the most important person in his life. The only catch? The rice is plastic. It was a few days after she left. I had run out of the instant rice I always kept on hand for emergencies and was contemplating going out to eat when the … [Read More]
The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre
At New Seoul Park, Korea’s greatest theme park, an enigmatic man tempts visitors with a mysterious jelly candy that promises an unbreakable bond. As the sun beats down on a muggy summer afternoon, a child separated from her disinterested parents, a single mother striving to create a memorable day on a shoestring budget, and a couple on the … [Read More]
Mirror Nation
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War and the National Book Award–winning DMZ Colony. Much like Proust’s madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi’s Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the … [Read More]
A Crane Among Wolves
A devastating and pulse-pounding tale that will feel all-too-relevant in today’s world, based on a true story from Korean history. Hope is dangerous. Love is deadly. 1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning … [Read More]
Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo
Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness is the first complete translation in any Western language of P’ahan chip, the earliest Korean work of sihwa (C. shihua; “remarks on poetry”) and one of the oldest extant Korean sources. The collection was written and compiled by Yi Illo (1152–1220) during the mid-Koryǒ dynasty (918–1392). P’ahan chip features poetry composed in Literary Chinese (the scriptura franca of the … [Read More]
Waltzing with Mosquitoes
A mosquito lies in wait until the perfect moment. One must be measured and patient in this battle of wits—rarely is the fool who moves first ultimately victorious. It was a rainy spring day when I first witnessed the mosquito’s waltz through my open window. It moved lyrically through the air, dodging raindrops perfectly in … [Read More]
Table for One
An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrolls in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to … [Read More]