Pak Wan-sŏ (not how she preferred her name to be Romanized, which was Park Wansuh), is a beloved Korean writer whose writing can at first appear deceptively simple; women’s works, so to speak. It is easy to lump her work into the category of that of Amy Tan in the United States, or how Kyoung-sook…
LOL, after rooting out all the dead links in the All Modern Korean Literature in Translation Online” Project! I went back and added a couple of authors and stories. I was particularly pleased to find the work from Kim Yong-ik, whose writing has always been criminally underestimated in English. The entire list of available stories…
Wayfarer: New Fiction by Korean Women is edited by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, which is typically an indication that the contents will be of high value and quality. The introduction, which is uncredited but sounds like the work of the Fultons, is a quick gloss of the historical position that women writers inhabited; to put…
After choking on a question the week before (“what authors are in the collection Waxen Wings?”), I came back last week to answer the question and describe the book (edited by Bruce Fulton). You can hear that segment in its entirety, below. https://www.ktlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/120306_CharlesM.mp3 iPod or download here
Questioning Minds is a collection of short stories by women writers (as the book notes ruefully, this is a common description in Korean) with an intentionally feminist bent. The fact that it is intended to be a textbook is perhaps its greatest weakness, LOL… well, maybe not in a classroom. The “academic” nature of the…
The Cruel City is one of those anthologies that might have made sense in Korean language and culture, but which seem illy conceived and unfocused in English-language practice. Hints that this might be the case are present even in the introduction, which not only completely neglects to address one of the stories in the book,…
The “Three Percent” website just put out a press release announcing its nominations for the best translated literature of the previous year. Here is the first paragraph of the press release: The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards was announced this morning at Three Percent—a resource for international literature at the…
The Short Story (see what I did there?!): A few good stories that can be found in other volumes – for the fan only. There is an interesting admission in the Translator’s Preface to The Snowy Road — and Other Stories.The translator’s note, that “the stories have a similar and undeniably Eastern flavor with neither…
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…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 8 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul Pak Wanseo’s (as her name is spelled on the book cover) Three Days in That Autumn is an austere, almost frigid account of the end days of a gynecologist (abortionist, actually) and her practice. The title is a clever…