“It’s wrong how we pretend we keep going forward.” Krys Lees’ Drifting House is the work of an accomplished author who looks, with unsparing eye, at some of the costs of living in the interstitial spaces between countries and cultures. In some ways reminiscent of Ch’oe Yun or Cho Se-hui, Lee is a master of…
With Krys Lee soon to return to Seoul to face a potential ‘sea of fire‘ we thought we’d share three video clips of Krys and agent Susan Golomb speaking at the The Center for Fiction on Feb 6, of this year. This is over 45 minutes of clips, so settle down with a good cup…
An interesting clip of Krys Lee talking about Drifting House – she discusses the effect of her dual environments, how the book developed, literary traditions, the origin of the title, alienation and her obsession with families. It’s just over 4 minutes long, and worth your time.
Part One of this series is here and now that she has published her piece the ‘famous author’ I mentioned there was Krys Lee. If there is one thing the West does know about Korea, it is North Korea. From cliché bad-guy leadership to some kind of nuclear threat, North Korea pops up regularly on…
A bit more good news on the awards front as Krys Lee’s Drifting House has been long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award. Launched in 2005, the award is presented each year to an original collection of stories judged to be the most accomplished. The award’s aim is to reward an individual author’s commitment…
All the good news about Shin Kyung-sook has temporarily overshadowed the other great recent news in Korean fiction, Krys Lee’s incredibly moving and sometimes depressing^^ Drifting House. So, with an eye towards getting back on a more general track, here is a 13 minute Vimeo in which Lee reads the last scene from The Pastor’s…
On Facebook, that most academic of sites, in a discussion with a famous author about North Korean diasporic fiction. Famous author asks the question what North Korean diasporic literature am I aware of? My answer and the conversation is quite brief as I wrack my brains to try to come up with examples of it.…
An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal titled, Another Korea Wave: New Books in U.S.. The article title invokes hallyu, but in fact the article says: But Korea is getting quite a bit of attention in the U.S. in a different medium – books. Three important and substantively different books about the Korean peninsula…
Some of this is semi-covered in the previous podcast, but some of it gets closer to an actual review of Drifting House. Anyone who wants to listen to me live can tune in every Tuesday morning at about 10:06 (Seoul Time), online here. I was bit off my game, but don’t think I made any…
Talking with Krys Lee, the author of the new and excellent collection of short stories Drifting House, can be a little bit surreal. On the phone she is energetic and cheerful (even as, in our interview, she was fighting off a cough), and it is difficult to reconcile that personality with the solemn, often tragic…