For nearly a century, the Deep Ones have remained a staple of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology, often serving as unsettling supporting figures in tales of cosmic horror. Atlas of Deep Ones (available here on Amazon) transforms this dynamic by placing these amphibious beings at the forefront of an expansive anthology dedicated to their history and culture.…
Thanks to all who came out… The PPT describing the history of Korean literature is attached… YonseismallupateGood1
For those of you who don’t know, most of my writing has migrated to the Los Angeles Review of Books Korea Blog and Seoul Magazine. Recently Seoul Magazine published my review of Cho Chongnae’s (Jo Jung-rae) “The Human Jungle” in the mighty Seoul Magazine: For some reason they chose to use a graphic of the…
Kwon Sun-chan and Nice People is by Lee Ki-ho who has also had At Least We Can Apologize and So Far, and Yet So Near translated into English. It is a very short story of two men and a problem. The narrator is a professor living away from Seoul and his family. He lives in…
It’s my bi-weekly piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books Korea Blog. This week the article is BRIGHT LIES, BIG CITY: KOREAN AUTHORS AND SEOUL. Below you will find additional information on the books/stories I mentioned on the LARB Blog .Here’s an excerpt and below that the information on all the works mentioned in the…
Not exactly earth-shaking. But when I ordered Modern Short Stories from Korea from “Pursuit of Happiness” Books in “Good” shape I did not expect a partially torn off cover and disconnected spine. But as the only other copy cost $125.00 on Amazon(!) I decided to go online and figure out how to fix…
Oh my, … in my last review of Modern Short Stories From Korea the first book of translated Korean modern literature in English I noted that it was naturalistic, non-didactic, and even occasionally funny. So next I picked up Collected Short Stories from Korea (Technically “Volume 1” but so far as I know the only…
Three Voices at Midnight by Shing Sang-ung (Translated by Ahn Juhg-hyo) is an interesting amalgamation of internal stories. It is the story of a three-way love affair (not at all physical) between three men. It is also that relatively rare thing in Korean fiction as story about the Civil War as an actual battle. It…
Last week in a “stop the presses” moment for Korean literature, Han Kang won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her harrowing and brilliant The Vegetarian. Mention should also be made of her excellent translator Deborah Smith who wrote brilliantly literary prose. Han Kang’s achievement immediately became the biggest ‘win’ in Korean translated literature,…
Korean Fiction Chapters: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4/ 5 / In 1877 King Gojong and Queen Min sent a group of Koreans to Japan to examine its technological and social changes. What they found amazed them, as while Korea had once considered itself the modern hub of Asia, Japan had modernized far beyond Korean expectations or experience. While Queen…