Rules: Have your reading club randomly choose five Kim Young-ha works to read. Each reader may read 50 pages of any one work each day. As you find examples of Kim’s representative themes, fill out your bingo card. The first reader to complete a horizontal, vertical, or 4-space diagonal line wins a pair of reading…
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…
I met with noted author Shin Kyung-sook, writer of the tremendously successful Please Look After Mom (엄마를 부탁해), at the cafe at the Kim Jong-yeong Museum (thoroughly beautiful, by the way), located in Pyeongchang-dong, Jongno-gu. I was with Dylan Goldsby a photographer who was taking pictures for an upcoming segment on Ms. Shin in 10…
Regular readers know that I have puzzled over the lack of translated Korean humor in the past, attempting to determine what the reasons for it might be (as in here where I talk about examples of it and here where I discuss why it might be difficult to translate). The one thing I have not…
UPDATE: I received a very nice response from focloir in reply to my complaint with them and it has exactly turned me around on them. I am temporarily keeping part of my splenetic original post at the bottom here (mainly so people can laugh at how Korea’s tin-pot culture has become part of me), but…
The power of the internet is enormous. It took fewer than 24 hours after we posted our semi-satirical “The Night Before Chuseok” before an email landed in our email box. We were chuffed to hear that our brilliant poetry was being considered by the Best Poems Encyclopedia for publication along with the works of such…
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHUSEOK ‘Twas the night before 추석, when all through the 집 Not a sound could be heard, not a cicida’s cheep; The spam boxes were stacked in the cupboard with care, In hopes that the relatives soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of…
If you’ve been following this blog (or are a regular reader of 10 Magazine) you saw an article about finding foreign books in Korea (which focused on the excellent Foreigners Bookstore near Noksapyeong Station and What the Book in Itaewon). Now, thanks to Jacco Zweetsloot and Claire Lee at the Korea Herald, I know of…
(NOTE: This is the first bit of my effort to recreate the narrative of how I got interested in Korean literature, what it’s meant to me, and a little bit about the literature itself. These essays, if that is the word, will be collected under the “Finding Hong Gildong” menu at the upper right. This…
A really interesting essay over on the New York Times website, titled “Midnight’s Other Children.” (sometimes this link requires registration, sometimes it does not). Th It talks about the differences between Granta’s “rollout” of Indian translated literature and now Pakistani translated literature. The article makes several points, but among the most important is the difference…