The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 3 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul The Cry of the Magpies, By Kim Dong-Ni begins with an unusual literary conceit. The narrator tells us that what we are about to read is his retelling of a book he once came across that moved him as…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 22 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul The Portable Library of Korean Literatures’ twenty-second imprint is Chinatown by Oh Jung Hee (Also romanized as O chonghui, O Chong-hui). This contains three stories, the eponymous Chinatown, Wayfarer, and The Release. These stories have been translated by the…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 14 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul I read my first stories of Kim Yu-Jeong while concurrently reading the essay Extravagance and Authenticity by Kim Uchang. This proved an interesting set of readings as the essay and the stories focus on romantic love. Kim Uchang’s essay…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 1 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul In a recently published essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmunson pleads for a contingency that I hope someone can help us achieve: If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature (PLKL) is an outstanding collection. It is easy to read, inexpensive, colorfully bound (though the hangeul cover design is in mirrored text, which seems an odd decision), and chock full of great stories, often several to a volume. If there is one flaw in the “The Portable Library of…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 20 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul Lee Dong-Ha’s “A Toy City” tells the story of family moving to the city (having been kicked out of their small town by unnamed political pressures). In the course of this move the narrator’s father, a respected and loved…
The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 16 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul Choi In-Hoon’s “House of Idols” begins with an unnamed narrator and the sentence, “The war was over, the capital back in Seoul.” Despite the apparent “return to normalcy” of the first line, the story describes a world in which…