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!
A Forgotten British War: The Accounts of Korean War Veterans
This book presents oral histories from the last surviving UK veterans of the Korean War. With the help of the UK National Army Museum and the British Korean Society, this book collects nearly twenty testimonials of UK veterans of the Korean War. Many only teenagers when mobilized, these veterans attempt to put words to the ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism
Once the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897–1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of “erasure”—monumental ... [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)
I Went to See My Father
An instant bestseller in Korea and the follow up to the international bestseller, Please Look After Mom; centering on a woman’s efforts to reconnect with her aging father, uncovering long-held family secrets. Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Togani
Atmospheric and fast-paced, this novel of manners set in a provincial South Korean city leads readers through the silent corridors of a school for hearing-impaired children and the city’s foggy back streets and murky centers of power to a stirring courtroom climax. Gong Jiyoung’s Togani (The Crucible), published in Korean in 2009, is based on a historic case ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The Consultant
Sometimes work can be murder… The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for… restructuring. Nothing obvious or messy. Certainly nothing anyone would ever suspect as murder. The ‘natural deaths’ he plans have always gone well: a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. His performance reviews are excellent. ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The Specters of Algeria
A group of dramatists that commit what was a subversive act during the South Korean military dictatorships of the twentieth century – distributing copies of Karl Marx’s only surviving play, The Specters of Algeria. The consequences of the brutal crackdown by the authorities would set the directions of the lives of two children of the ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Painter of the Wind
A heart-wrenching and gripping novel with over a million copies sold! Painter of the Wind is a masterful novel that was adapted into a popular, award winning South Korean TV series. This gem of a book also delights readers with a rare collection of thirty-four colour paintings, including Shin Yun-bok’s Portrait of a Beauty and Kim Hong-do’s Wrestling. Set ... [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)
The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories
This eclectic, moving and wonderfully enjoyable collection is the essential introduction to Korean literature. Journeying through Korea’s dramatic twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and colonial era, to the devastating war between north and south and the rapid, disorienting urbanization of later decades, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories captures a hundred years of Korea’s ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Greek Lessons
A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
ReFocus: The Films of Kim Ki-young
The first comprehensive scholarly volume on Kim Ki-young and his films in English Offers an innovative critical analysis of Kim Ki-young’s films from a range of fresh and nuanced perspectives Introduces a significant South Korean film auteur within the history of global cinema whose work has been previously overlooked Increases the understanding of modern South ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Song of Arirang: The Story of a Korean Rebel Revolutionary in China
From the publisher’s website: 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 ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia
A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars. In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Mater 2-10
International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story — an epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Justifying Violence on Korea’s Cold War Frontlines: The Life and Representations of Kim Tu-han
The son of a nationalist martyr, Kim Tu-han (1918-1972) rose to prominence as a mobster in 1930s Seoul. As conditions shifted, he deployed his gang first as a construction corps supporting the Japanese war effort, then as a progressive force, and, most successfully, as an anti-communist vigilante group. After narrowly escaping the death sentence for ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives on the Primary Sources
Bringing together a wealth of primary sources and with contributions from leading experts, Korean Dress History presents the most recent approaches to the interpretation of Korean dress. Through close analysis of an impressive range of visual, written, and material sources―some newly excavated or recently re-discovered in global museums―the book reveals how Korean clothing and accessories evolved from ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital
A cutting-edge journalistic exposé of self-care consumerism, using the extreme case South Korea to both celebrate the astounding growth of K-Beauty and South Korean pop culture as a global export and examine the dark implications for women in a looks-obsessed patriarchy, in a debut that asks the question: What is the future of beauty? From ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Human-Animal Relations and the Hunt in Korea and Northeast Asia
Studies the hunt, animals and how regional dynamics informed local cultural practices on the Korean peninsula Elucidates the significance of the peninsula in regional and Eurasian history through detailing and navigating animals and the hunt, themes scholarship has overlooked. Reframes the struggle between a kingship and a powerful bureaucracy competing for authority over an expanding ... [Read More]
Another Person
Vacuum cleaner bitch. When Jina sees this anonymous comment on a forum it forces her out of her stupor. It is posted on a website dissecting her public allegations of workplace sexual assault, the backlash to which forced her to quit her job. She has spent months glued to her laptop screen, junk-food packaging piling ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China
For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Korea: A New History of South and North
A major new history of North and South Korea, from the late nineteenth century to the present day Korea has a long, riveting history—it is also a divided nation. South Korea is a vibrant democracy, the tenth largest economy, and is home to a world-renowned culture. North Korea is ruled by the most authoritarian regime ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The Sister
The onset of Covid-19 has coincided with the dramatic rise of a young woman called Kim Yo Jong in North Korea. Stomping the world stage from the shadows of her secretive state, she is creating headlines and fevered speculation about her role and her future. She is the sister of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Literature and Cultural Identity during the Korean War: Comparing North and South Korean Writing
Through an in-depth analysis of wartime essays and literary works, Literature and Cultural Identity during the Korean War considers the similarities and differences in the way that writers from both North and South Korea perceived and experienced the conflict. In this book, Jerôme de Wit examines the social impact of major themes in the output ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Introducing Korean Popular Culture
This new textbook is a timely and interdisciplinary resource for students looking for an introduction to Korean popular culture, exploring the multifaceted meaning of Korean popular culture at micro and macro levels and the process of cultural production, representation, circulation and consumption in a global context. Drawing on perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The End of August
A multi-generational, multilingual epic by the bestselling author of Tokyo Ueno Station In the 1930s, Lee Woo-chul’s talent as a runner leads him to be selected for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics – but with Korea under Japanese occupation, he will have to run with the Rising Sun on his chest. In the present day, his ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Counterweight
For fans of the worlds of Philip K. Dick, Squid Game and Severance: An absorbing tale of corporate intrigue, political unrest, unsolved mysteries, and the havoc wreaked by one company’s monomaniacal endeavor to build the world’s first space elevator — from one of South Korea’s most revered science fiction writers, whose identity remains unknown. On the fictional ... [Read More]
The Owl Cries
From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a slow-burning noir thriller with a touch of horror and the uncanny. A lawyer asking questions. A disappearance. And a vast forest in the mountains—the western woods—where the trees huddle close together, emanating a crushing darkness, while a chill dampness fills the air. The forester, Bak ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The Apology
“Bold, original, and utterly captivating, The Apology is a sweeping intergenerational saga, delivered by one of the sharpest, most memorable voices I’ve ever read. A stunning new novel by a writer whose work I’ve long admired.” —Kirstin Chen, author of Counterfeit In South Korea, a 105-year-old woman receives a letter. Ten days later, she has been thrust into ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima”
Most of us the world over do not know much about the nuclear experience, let alone the 70,000 Korean victims of the atomic bomb or their arts of life and survival. Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima” gives new insight into the overlooked and abused people who have lived and died on the margins ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
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)
Indeterminate Inflorescence
Joining the lineup for 2023, we are thrilled to announce our first project with translator Anton Hur. INDETERMINATE INFLORESCENCE is a collection of aphorisms on poetry-writing by the South Korean poet Lee Seong-bok, assembled by his students from his lectures. The aphorisms are small poems in their own right, and their cumulative force is to ... [Read More]
Can’t I go instead?
No official synposis yet. From Yes24 website, run through Papago translation engine: The icon of youth literature, author Lee Geum’s first historical novel, “A Girl’s Attractive Life Trip Ready to Go Her Way Anytime,” there, can I go? In short, there is a person who lived a life that no one could have dreamed of ... [Read More]
Didi’s Umbrella
Hwang Jungeun’s DIDI’S UMBRELLA, about national mourning and political revolution in the wake of the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster that killed 304 Korean citizens, following a non-binary gig worker grieving the sudden death of their romantic partner; meanwhile, an inquisitive writer whose queer family encompasses her same-sex partner, her sister, and her nephew, researches a ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945
Focusing on previously neglected cultural expressions of colonial-period Korean socialism such as Marxist philosophy, Marxist historiography, and travelogues by socialist writers, The Red Decades reveals Marxian socialism as a cultural phenomenon of colonial-age Korea. Providing an account of the social composition of the Communist milieu in 1920s and 1930s Korea and outlining the aims of ... [Read More] (Link to online store)
Moral Authoritarianism: Neighborhood Associations in the Three Koreas, 1931–1972
Moral Authoritarianism offers a new perspective on the three modern Korean states—the Japanese colonial state, South Korea, and North Korea—by studying neighborhood associations during the four war decades (1930s–1960s). The existing historiography perceives the three states in relation to imperialism and to the Cold War, thus emphasizing their differences by political changes. By shifting the focus ... [Read More]
Stranger than Paradise
No official synopsis available. Here’s a review from Korean Literature Now: The novel Stranger than Paradise offers a unique narrative structure with each character’s point of view accessible to the reader. The book reads like a road trip movie telling the story of two men and a woman traveling in a car. Kim and Choi are the ... [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)
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.