My Clint Eastwood, by Oh Han-Ki was perhaps the most difficult of the ASIA Publishers K-Fiction series for me to read, partly because for my entire life Clint Eastwood has been an icon to me and one of the things that Oh Han-ki ruthlessly explores is the difference between the concept of the “icon” and the…
Two line drives directly out of the park to kick this ASIA Publisher series off (that would be two “for-sixes”, “goals”, or “cabers tossed a very long distance” to some of you strange foreign people) Arpan (available now on Amazon) by Park hyoung su is another shock to a habitual reader of Korean literature in translation as…
The ASIA Publishers K-fiction series kicks of with a powerful bang with Park Min-gyu’s novella, Dinner with Buffet (available on Amazon). It’s a powerful novella, compellingly written, and just about as timely as a work of literature can be. Park Min-gyu is in equal parts satirist and stylist and in Dinner with Buffet his style and…
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…
I first noticed this news in an email update from Kokkiri at the excellent Subject Object Verb. Yi Mun-yol has had his story An Anonymous Island published in the New Yorker, which is certainly good news. Unfortunately, it is a subscription/pay by the story deal, so you’ll have to pay to read the thing. This…
From the Korea Society’s Podcast Webpage: On February 17, 2011, The Korea Society’s Korea In-Depth Lecture Series hosted scholar Ann Choi Wan for a lecture entitled, “Modern Korean Literature: Searching for Identity at Home and in the World.” Wan contrasted the themes of romantic love and individualism in the first “modern” Korean novels with earlier…
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…