This is another way (other than that link you see on the right: Where to Start in Korean Modern Fiction) to gain a quick understanding of Korean Modern Literature. That way is to collect the books in the excellent LTI Korea / Jimoondang collaborative series The Portable Library of Korean Fiction. These books are now,…
A new project. To find all the places online where you can read translated Korean Modern Literature, free ( Here are the works so far (I still have to get all the Korea Journal articles before 1989 and many of the works translated by Brother Anthony). If you know of a work that is NOT…
There is no better time than now to begin to read modern Korean literature. It’s many talented authors write in myriad genres and in the past 25 years have begun to skillfully meld innately Korean history and culture to stories with international appeal.
One of my colleagues at Dongguk is asking all and sundry to go his survey and answer some fairly brief questions about Yi Sang’s “The Wings.” You can do the man a favor right here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9GV3T7F
An article in the JoongAng Daily today does a nice job of outlining the importance of Yi Sang to modern Korean literature and filling in a bit about his life and beliefs. Some interesting points include that he had no formal training in literature (was in fact an engineer), loved art, and worked irrespective of…
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…
Korean modern literature is relatively agency-less. As a result, the anti-social hero is rare in Korean literature and the tragic hero is even less evident.
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…