Eun Hee-kyung’s Poor Man’s Wife is another excellent volume in the “Bi-lingual Edition Modern Korean Literature” published by Asia Publishers. I had the pleasure of meeting Eun Hee-kyung, which is covered here, and she is a sharp and clear-writing author of works focusing on the role and position of women in modern Korean. The story…
Land of Excrement by Nam Jung-hyun is an interesting and unusual book from the Bilingual Edition of Modern Korean Fiction. The first thing of interest may be the title, which is super-tricky, even in Korean. The Korean title for this book is 분지, which normally means “valley,” in Korean. In fact, every Korean I showed…
Yi Mun-yol is, perhaps, one of Korea’s most under-rated writers, not because his writing is unknown, but because he has spent a large portion of his literary career out of step with the political winds of his time. And so it is in his short story, Pilon’s Pig. Pilon’s Pig is a short story that,…
The short story Stab (Stab Wound in literal translation) is something kind of different for Kim In-suk, at least in translation, as it is based in Korea – Kim is one of the few authors in Korea who routinely sites her stories overseas. It is also very short – only 53 pages of the book…
Soul of Darkness (어둠의 혼), other than REALLY tempting me to make some kind of horrible pun that might end up as a blog name, is a brief, ugly, but completely transparent snapshot of what happens when starvation and politics intersect. In that way, it is also a snapshot of a particular time in Korean…
Our Friend’s Homecoming (돌아온 우리의 친구) by Shin Sang-ung (신 상 웅) is a short story/novella that was written some time in 1977-8 during a series called the Roadside Drinking Stall, which was turned into a collection in Korean. A roadside drinking stall is a place, often illegal, for quick drinking, a place to eliminate…
Here at KTLIT we are happy to welcome a new contributor aboard, Dongmi Hwang. Dongmi is, among other things, bilingual and bi-cultural, and as an introduction, we thought we do some side-by-side reviews, so that readers could get dual perspectives on the works we review here. Particularly interesting to me was the different ways we…
Shin Kyung-sook’s Where the Harmonium Was is an excellent short story that could be recommended to almost anyone. Published in 1993 it tells the story of a woman who is haunted by 10 days of her life when she was “six or seven”, the 10 days, after her mother deserted the family that another woman,…