Booklist: books published in last 12 months

Squid Game meets The Left Hand of Darkness meets Under the Skin in this radical literary sensation from South Korea about an alien’s hunt for food that transforms into an existential crisis about what it means to be human. After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

From the very first moment she set foot in South Korea, Barbara Zitwer, literary agent to some of the most celebrated, prize-winning Korean authors, fell head-over-heels in love, discovering there a renewed sense of happiness and energy. In this witty, charming book, Zitwer shares all that she has learnt about this fascinating country: a vibrant, ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

How did Korea with a relatively small-scale music industry come to create a vibrant pop culture scene that would enthrall not only young Asian fans but also global audiences from diverse racial and generational backgrounds? From idol training to fan engagement, from studio recording to mastering choreographic sequences, what are the steps that go into ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women’s movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women’s press, and finds that ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

A remarkable intergenerational coming-of-age novel set in South Korea—about friendship, belonging, and displacement. Growing up outside a US military base in South Korea in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu—the son of a Korean mother and a German father enlisted in the US Army—spends his days with his “half and half” friends skipping school, ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Tasan Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836) is one of the most creative thinkers Korea has ever produced, one of the country’s first Christians, and a leading scholar in Confucian philosophy. Born in a staunchly Neo-Confucian society, in his early twenties he encountered writings by Catholic missionaries in China and was fascinated. However, when he later learned that ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

What does it take for ordinary citizens to risk everything to protest living under a repressive government? What takes them beyond the brink, to the “boiling point”? In his graphic novel 100°C, celebrated webtoon and comics artist Choi Kyu-sok sheds a light on these questions by examining the lives of one family caught up in the great ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

South Korea is best-known for its economic development, democratic transition and consolidation, vibrant civil society, and emergence as a cultural powerhouse. The Oxford Handbook of South Korean Politics presents and analyses contemporary South Korean politics, bringing together domestic political, economic, social cultural, and demographic developments and putting them in the context of trends in fellow ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

An innumerable number of young women were taken from Korea during the Pacific War to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers. These women including teenagers, euphemistically referred in Japanese documents as Comfort Women, were shipped to the vastly expanded battle fronts throughout the Japan-occupied territories covering from Northern China to Myanmar and to the South ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

A debut English-language collection of hopeful and carefully attentive poems by one of South Korea’s most lauded young poets. This collection offers a selection of poems from Sin Yong-mok’s earlier collections, intended to serve as an illustration of his evolution as a poet, alongside a complete translation of the poems from his fourth collection, When ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

In Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea Namhee Lee explores memory construction and history writing in post-1987 South Korea. The massive neoliberal reconstruction of all aspects of society shifted public discourse from minjung (people) to simin (citizen), from political to cultural, from collective to individual. This shift reconstituted people as Homo economicus, rights-bearing and rights-claiming individuals, ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

An English version of the letters of Father Ga Gyeong-ja Choi Yang-eop (1821-1861), the seminarian colleague of the first Korean priest Sung Kim Dae-geon (1821-1846) and the second Korean priest. The Korean Church History Institute (Chairman: Bishop Son Hee-song, Director: Father Cho Han-geon) published the English version of the letters of Father Thomas Choi Yang-eop, ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Brilliantly illustrated and designed by the London-based film magazine Little White Lies, Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema examines the career of the South Korean writer/director, who has been making critically acclaimed feature films for more than two decades. First breaking out into the international scene with festival-favorite Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Bong then set his sights on the story ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

This book contains the complete works of Yoon Dong-ju (1917-1945), one of the most beloved poets for all Koreans, and is the first attempt at English translation in their entirety, poetry and prose. Yoon’s writings reflect the ardor and longing lodged in every young man’s and woman’s heart. In that sense, the poems contained herein ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

A gripping account of an Ivy League activist-turned-fugitive and his clandestine effort to overthrow the murderous North Korean regime, a heart-pounding investigation into personal agency and the price of freedom from the New York Times bestselling co-author of Billion Dollar Whale In the early 2000s Adrian Hong was a soft-spoken undergraduate at Yale who, like ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Earth is experiencing a sweltering heatwave caused by a second “sun” – a shining object in the sky that either looks like Pac-Man or a pizza missing a slice, depending on who you ask. As this object increases in size and risks making Earth uninhabitable, the Korean government decides it has to do its part ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

K-pop, K-fashion, K-drama, K-beauty: over the last decade, K-style has exploded onto the global scene. Where does it go from here? In Make, Break, Remix, Fiona Bae makes no attempt to define or categorize the movement, instead celebrating the eclectic, multifaceted nature of K-style and its home city of Seoul. Through interviews with tastemakers who ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Age of Doubt collects some of Pak Kyongni’s most famous works, including her 1955 debut and other stories featuring characters that would appear in her 21-volume epic, Toji. Many of Pak’s stories reflect her own turbulent experiences during the period following the Korean war and the various South Korean dictatorships throughout the twentieth century. ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” Her first book, the highly original postmodern text Dictee, is now an internationally studied work of autobiography. This volume, spanning the period between 1976 and ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Holding hands, we walk along Banghak Stream. Wherever he points, I find a poem. On some days, taking the form of ducks; on others, taking after white-naped cranes. Black koi swirl the clear water like brush strokes, and therein lies another poem. A poem rippling. Scattering. Startling tiny minnows. Fleeing from grey herons. From“ Poet’s ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

North Korean Women in Power is the first field report on North Korea written by a South Korean woman reporter in English. Chun Su-jin, who refers to herself as a “Korean-Korean (South Korean nationality with a North Korean heritage),” introduces four North Korean women who make Chairman Kim Jong-un complete—the one and only blood to ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

An ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies. The term “flower of capitalism” is a clichéd metaphor for advertising in South Korea, bringing ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

In Privilege and Anxiety, Hagen Koo examines what has happened to the Korean middle class in the era of rapid globalization and demonstrates that the middle class has experienced significant changes in its social character. The middle classes in most advanced economies today are frequently described as being “squeezed” and “shrinking.” Globalization has inserted an “axis ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Growing up amid the starvation and oppression of 1990s North Korea, 10-year-old Cho Jun-su stumbles upon a mysterious game, left behind in a hotel room by a rare foreign visitor. As Jun-su painstakingly deciphers the rules of the game in secret, he unlocks an inner world that is at first an antidote and then a ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Pan’gye surok (or “Pan’gye’s Random Jottings”) was written by the Korean scholar and social critic Yu Hyŏngwŏn (1622-1673), who proposed to reform the Joseon dynasty and realise an ideal Confucian society. It was recognised as a leading work of political science by Yu’s contemporaries and continues to be a key text in understanding the intellectual culture ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea provides an in-depth look at the lives of families in Korea that include immigrants. Ten original chapters in this volume, written by scholars in multiple social science disciplines and covering different methodological approaches, aim to reinvigorate contemporary discussions about these multicultural families. Specially, the volume expands the scope of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

South Korea’s economic miracle is a well-known story. However, today Korea is confronting a new set of internal and external risks, which may foreshadow the next crisis. The Korean economy has been struggling with the faltering growth momentum and the rise of unprecedented socio-economic problems over recent years well before the pandemic crisis. After abrupt ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Investigative journalist, author and broadcaster Geoff White is among the UK’s leading technology specialists, working for the BBC, Channel 4 News, The Sunday Times and many more. In a career spanning 20 years he has covered election hacking, the dark web, the personal data trade and the emergence of cybercrime as one of the primal ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

North Korea is an open-air prison from which there is no escape. Only a handful of men and women have succeeded. Jihyun Park is one of these rare survivors. Twice she left the land of the ‘socialist miracle’ to flee famine and dictatorship. By the age of 29 she had already witnessed a lifetime of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The essential account of the South Korean 1980 pro-democracy rebellion On 18 May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with unmitigated violence. Hundreds of students, activists and citizens were arrested, tortured and murdered. This fresh translation ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Poet Dongman Moon’s Think Less of Sadness English version. Perhaps the world is a place full of sorrow, and no one can escape the sorrow that comes upon them. The upright will to live “eating deliciously / thinking less about sad things/like green beans” is permeated throughout the poetry, even if you can’t handle all ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

An English version of Poet Chul Park’s collection of poems Follow the Birds. The poet, who has looked into the edge of his life, is quietly approaching the sick beings alone in this collection of poems. You can also meet the poet’s notes and essays that give a glimpse of the poet’s poetry. Souce: Info ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Twenty-one years after the publication of his landmark debut collection Yellow, Don Lee returns to the short story form for his sixth book, The Partition. The Partition is an updated exploration of Asian American identity, this time with characters who are presumptive model minorities in the arts, academia, and media. Spanning decades, these nine novelistic stories traverse an ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

This edited collection investigates the mobilities, resettlement practices, and identities of North Korean defectors who have relocated to the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The contributors to this volume examine the complex nature of defection from North Korea, highlighting the ways in which defectors renegotiate their identities in order to adapt ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

When a mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Streets in Korea rarely go quiet without first having a public demonstration and Korean citizens are known as seasoned protestors, charting the course of national politics. Between the Streets and the Assembly explores how protest movements have become the prominent mode of democratic politics in Korea, in contrast to political parties in the National Assembly ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Drawing on previously unused or underutilized archival sources, this book offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea’s democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s. It shows how local pro-democracy activists pragmatically engaged with global advocacy groups, especially Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches, to maximize ... [Read More] (Link to online store)