Kim Mi-wol‘s What Has Yet to Happen is an unusual and clever “end of the world” story: There is no Bruce Willis character to save the day; there is no spaceship to hop on and escape; in fact there is not even much in the way of panic. The initial reaction of people in this book is…
Tip of the hat and waggle of the walking stick to the fearless translators at the blog subject object verb for noting that, “Two books from the Dalkey Archive Press Library of Korean Literature, Lee Ki-ho’s At Least We Can Apologize (tr. by Chris Dykas) and Jang Eun-jin’s No One writes Back (tr. by Jung Yewon),…
Bae Su-ah’s (whose Wikipedia page,we massively re-created in October 2013) Highway With Green Apples is a melancholic tale. With that said, it seem particularly suited for certain kind of reader, both in Korea and abroad, in English we might put it in the genre or relationship or women’s fiction and fans of those kinds of stories will find this…
Dishonored by Choi Min-Woo, is the 5th work in the ASIA Publishers K-Literature series of bilingual fiction (Korean and English) and it is the closest to a genre work of the pieces printed so far. Yet, it manages to take the “spy genre” if you will, and spill bits of it here and there, while…
As part of the next of the 5 Dalkey Press Korean Literature Series (more about that awesomeness tomorrow!), Ch’oe In ho’s Another Man’s City has been translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, whose imprimatur as translator is always a good sign. Ch’oe is perhaps most famous for his work The Square, which compared the two underlying…
A reminder that today at about 7:10 pm (Seoul time) and then again at 4 am Monday morning (Seoul time) you can hear me on Catch The Wave discussing 5 short stories that roughly sketch out the eras of Korean modern literature Colonial (with three mini-eras) Separation Miracle on the Han Post-modern For that, I…