Amazingly happy news at a US bookstore! Meeting one of my ex-students from Dongguk University, and we chose to meet for coffee at a bookstore with a coffeeshop in the back. I walk into the front door of the Elliot Bay Bookstore (an unbelievably great bookstore in Seattle, WA. Address: 1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122 Phone:…
LTI Korea has been doing some awesome things recently, including getting President Kim Seong-kon re-appointed and expanding it’s social media footprint. LOL, I suspect those two things are related. So, in our semi-regular set of hops, skips, and jumps across the Internet in search of tidbits about Korean literature in translation? This week we focus…
The American Prospect has just published an article on Korean literature in translation, entitle Korean Lit Comes to America, including some comparisons to Japan and China, and it’s worth checking out, and not just because I am in it using my favorite comparison of the place of Korea literature in respect to other translated literatures:…
Recently, I was interviewed by Arirang TV’s INNERview, and that show has now aired. However, it is also available on YouTube (in segments), or as a complete Video On Demand on the Arirang site. If you would like a taste of what I look (ugh!) and sound like, here is a short clip about my…
When Alice Munro won the Nobel Peace Prize last night over candidates including Korean poet Ko Un, who had been rising in the odds (up to third place behind Murukami and Munro according to this recent article), it meant another year of speculation in Korea as to when, and if, it’s Nobel Prize literary breakthrough…
An interesting typo, found along the Google way – Westerners of a certain age (my own included) think of “twister” as an entirely different thing – I’m sure Yi Munyol is flexible enough for either interpretation.^^
I’ve written about Kim Sakkat elsewhere as Yi Munyol’s excellent fictional character in his book The Poet (available on Amazon for nearly nothing – so why don’t you just head over there and buy it? I’ll wait). But as I’m still sorting through Humour in Korean Literature in some search for why and where Korean…
Over at the Korean Cultural Center I checked out a copy of Modern Korean Fiction An Anthology, Edited by Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon. While I do have serious reservations about this anthology, I have to say that if you judge the anthology in a vacuum, it is certainly an adequate introduction to Korean modern…