Upcoming books

Here are the upcoming Korea-related books that we’re particularly looking forward to – both fiction and non-fiction. There are probably loads more that we should be looking forward to, if only we knew about them. Sorted by anticipated publication date, with the most imminent titles at the top of the page. Some of the further-out dates may be a little bit speculative on our part; as we get nearer the time the dates will become clearer.

If you know about any titles you think we should be tracking, please let us know via the form at the bottom of this page. We can only log the titles we know about, so do tell!

Cornerstone of the Nation: The Defense Industry and the Building of Modern Korea under Park Chung Hee

Cornerstone of the Nation is the first historical account of the complex alliance of military and civilian forces that catapulted South Korea’s conjoined militarization and industrialization under Park Chung Hee (1961–1979). Kwon reveals how Park’s secret program to build an independent defense industry spurred a total mobilization of business, science, labor, and citizenry, all of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981 – 2022

Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981—2022 is a new book about nonfiction filmmaking in the private and independent sectors of South Korean cinema and media from the early 1980s to the present day. Drawing on the methodologies of documentary studies, experimental film and video, digital cinema, local discourses on independent documentary, and the literature on ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Dawn of Labor

Dawn of Labor, at last translated into English, is the legendary South Korean poet Park Nohae’s first collection, published in 1984 when he was twenty-seven years old. Despite a government ban, the book sold a million copies and propelled Park Nohae as the generation’s leading resistance poet. Dawn of Labor is an enduring classic that shook a ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Korean Welfare State: Social Investment in an Aging Society

The birth and remarkable expansion of Korean social welfare policy over the last several decades has taken place amidst the socio-economic burdens of a rapidly aging society. This book surveys these developments through the analytic lens of the Social Investment State, under which contemporary policies have altered the essential character of the 20th century welfare ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Modern Korean Digraphia: Metanarration and National Identity, 1894–1972

William Strnad traces the formation and development of modern Korean digraphia during the years 1894–1972, including a description and analysis of the historical discourse related to Korean phonetic script and Chinese characters. Modern Korean digraphia was contextualized and altered amid the global emancipation and speculative metanarratives of modernity, and the national metanarratives of nationalism and ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

We Do Not Part

Han Kang’s first full-length novel in five years since HUMAN ACTS. Like HUMAN ACTS it has its heart a tragic human event – in this case the massacre of civilians in 1948 on Jeju Island – a place to which the protagonist of this novel journeys in the present, progressively haunted by the spirits of ... [Read More]

Table for One: Stories

From the publisher’s website: 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 ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories

Korean writer Ch’oe Myŏngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic. ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Passcode to the Third Floor: An Insider’s Account of Life Among North Korea’s Political Elite

Thae Yong-ho was a leading North Korean diplomat to the United Kingdom and Northern Europe—until his dramatic defection to South Korea in 2016. In this gripping tell-all, he reveals the inner workings of the North Korean regime and shares the story of his decision to leave. Thae spent nearly three decades working under three generations ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Dawn of War in South Korea (1947-1950): The South Korean Workers’ Party and the April Third Massacre

This book offers an analytical account of the April Third Massacre in Korea, a bloody confrontation between supporters of the Syngman Rhee Administration and those suspected (largely incorrectly) of being Communists, or members of the South Korean Workers’ Party―the second largest Communist Party after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. As a result, some 80,000 ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

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] (Link to online store)

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] (Link to online store)

How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life: Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health

Discover the power of how K-Dramas can benefit your mental health and provide a sense of belonging In How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life, celebrated licensed mental health professional Jeanie Y. Chang explores the powerful interrelationship between Korean dramas, mental health, and belongingness. In the book, you’ll explore what K-Dramas have to teach us about our own ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Precious Beyond Measure: A History of Korean Ceramics

This is a captivating, richly illustrated history of the use of fired clay in Korea, spanning ancient times to the present day. Drawing on the latest research from Korean scholars, Precious beyond Measure features a wide range of examples from archaeological sites and museums. In addition, it offers a rare glimpse into the world of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea

Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea

While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

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] (Link to online store)

If You Live To One Hundred, You Might As Well Be Happy: Lessons for a Long and Joyful Life

‘I hope my book will give readers around the world a glimpse into Korean culture and will impact their lives, guiding and comforting them, even half as much as writing it changed mine.’ – Rhee Kun Hoo If You Live to One Hundred, You Might As Well Be Happy captivated South Korea, one of the fastest-ageing countries ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

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] (Link to online store)

The Three Kingdoms of Korea: Lost Civilizations

Korea’s Three Kingdoms period is a genuine ‘lost civilization’, during which ancient realms vied for supremacy during the first millennium CE. Nobles from this period’s feuding states adopted and adapted Buddhism and Confucianism through interactions with early medieval Chinese dynasties. In the mid-seventh century, with the assistance of the mighty Chinese Tang empire, the aristocratic ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

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] (Link to online store)

I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki

The sequel to the Sunday Times and international-bestselling South Korean therapy memoir, translated by International Booker Prize–shortlisted Anton Hur When Baek Sehee started recording her sessions with her psychiatrist, her hope was to create a reference for herself. She never imagined she would reach so many people, especially young people, with her reflections. I Want to Die but I ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

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]

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] (Link to online store)

Bojagi: The Art of Korean Textiles with Techniques and Projects

A creative guide to a unique and beautiful form of Korean art, steeped in ancient tradition. Bojagi (wrapping cloths) are textiles pieced together from small scraps of fabric – they are a unique form of Korean textile art. The careful arrangement of shapes and colours shows an abstract composition which has made bojagi popular with ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Black Orb

A piercingly dark, surreal satire on mass panic, disaster response and modern masculinity One evening in downtown Seoul, Jeong-su is smoking a cigarette outside when he sees something impossible: a huge black orb appears out of nowhere and sucks his neighbour inside. The orb soon begins consuming other people and no one knows how to ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The South Korean Film Industry

As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat

Situated in a rapidly gentrifying district of Seoul, Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat is a place where the extraordinary stories of ordinary residents unfold. Furnished with a coffee machine, a full bookshelf, and warm lighting, it is a haven from the world for many locals. And when a notebook is left behind there, it becomes a place ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Everything Good Dies Here: Tales from the Linker Universe and Beyond

Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea’s most provocative SF writers. Whether ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

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] (Link to online store)

The Proposal

The Proposal by Bae Myung-hoon takes the form of a sci-fi romance novel. In space, distance is represented by time. The protagonist, an operations officer of the United Earth Surface, is battling an unknown opponent. His girlfriend is still living on planet Earth, separated from him by 170 hours. He travels 170 hours to pay ... [Read More]

Marigold Mind Laundry

The comforting magical tale of a mysterious laundry that blooms into existence one night, and how its enigmatic owner summons her powers to heal souls and make dreams come true. We’re a mind laundry. What we wash and iron are the stains on your heart, the creases within you. If there’s anything upsetting you, we ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

Blood of the Old Kings

Powered by corpses of sorcerers, the Empire has conquered the world. It claims to have brought peace and stability to its conquered lands, but some see that peace for what it is—a lie—and will give everything to fight it. Loran was desperate for revenge after the Empire killed her family, so much so that she ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Healing Season of Pottery

The Healing Season of Pottery was first published by Mojosa in Korea earlier [in 2023]. It follows 30-year-old Jungmin who, burnt out from an all-consuming screenwriting career, finds solace in the art of pottery. Across four seasons – summer, autumn, winter and spring – Jungmin’s wounds slowly heal: pot by pot, plate by plate, she ... [Read More]

Runaway

The novel follows the narrative of Jae-young, a young woman fleeing an abusive relationship. Her life takes a dramatic turn when she crosses paths with a young single mother cradling her child on an early morning train. She was on her way to her wealthy in-laws, who opposed her marriage. Despite initial wariness, an unexpected ... [Read More]

One Thousand Blues

“One Thousand Blues won a prestigious science-fiction prize in Korea [4th Korea Sci-fi Literature Award] and became an instant bestseller. A hymn to the earth, a plea to slow down, to pay attention to our earth, it is set in the near future, and tells how a young woman befriends a faulty robot and together set ... [Read More]

The Korean Cinema Book

Publisher description: The volume provides the first detailed and authoritative overview of Korean cinema history, and in so doing develops new historical and critical understandings of Korean cinema from the period of Japanese colonial rule to the present day, with two very different cinematic traditions in this divided peninsula. The contributed chapters approach the subject ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Wailing

Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016) has been acclaimed as one of the very best horror films of recent years. In The Wailing, a mysterious illness turns its rural victims into comatose perpetrators of familicide. In the fog of an unknown spiritual war, police officer Jong-goo is helpless as his community fragments and suspicions turn to a mysterious Japanese ... [Read More] (Link to online store)

The Midnight Timetable

A novel-in-stories narrated by a night shift worker at a mysterious research center, where unsettling encounters ensue with the cursed objects studied there — the manifestations of their owners’ dread, guilt, and past mistakes that become living nightmares. Mazel tov, again, @AntonHur! More Bora Chung! (Also @thesafae ) pic.twitter.com/Ja629LT3Ih — Lawrence Schimel @lawrenceschimel.bsky.social (@lawrenceschimel) March ... [Read More]

This list can only contain the books we know about. So if you’re aware of an upcoming book that we should be tracking, whether fiction or non-fiction, let us know about it. If it’s literature in translation, we’ll definitely add it. If it’s non-fiction, we’ll probably add it, but reserve the right to politely decline because hours in the day, and database space, are finite resources.