A version of this review was first published in Acta Korean in December 2014, with a companion review of Choe In-hun’s The Square by Barry Welsh. The entire volume is worth checking out.^^ Pavane for a Dead Princess takes Park Min-gyu’s swift literary punching power, clever dialogue, and loathing of modernity, and gives us a…
Things found on the web in random hops, skips, and jumps. Because that’s how we roll. • Oldish. but the Three Percent Blog talks a little bit about the Dalkey Archive Press collection of Korean translations. It is the second segment of the blog and begins at about 11:05. This is very interesting as…
Thanks to those of you who came out today on late notice, and on the first nice Saturday of Spring. The powerpoint presentation I gave is available here: .Seoul ABC – Korean Litsmall. You will note, for ease of download it has been stripped of most graphics and a few slides. Anyone interested in an…
FIND OUT TOMORROW!! How old do you think the people in that picture to the right are? That’s the picture of Sonagi from Google’s page honoring Hwang Sun-won on his recent birthday. But those people are at least 14, possibly even 15 or 16? Why does it matter? Because that’s how English-language readers often think…
Join me on Saturday 28th March for a trip from Shamanist chants, through pansori, pundan munhak, modern literature and post-modern literature. I will begin with philosophy, roll quickly through history, and then arrive at modern literature (From The Tale Of Hong Gildong on) and outline it through primarily translated literature that is available for any English…
LTI Korea has been doing some awesome things recently, including getting President Kim Seong-kon re-appointed and expanding it’s social media footprint. LOL, I suspect those two things are related. So, in our semi-regular set of hops, skips, and jumps across the Internet in search of tidbits about Korean literature in translation? This week we focus…
A while ago on this blog I was semi-complaining about the cover for Kyung-sook Shin’s new book. You can see that semi-whine here. So it was with great happiness that I show the following two book covers for Han Kang’s awesome and terrifying novel Vegetarian. While the Shin cover is cliches in search of a…
The Investigation by Jung-Myung Lee (translated by Chi-Young Kim) has been longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. KTLIT really liked this book when it first came out, saying it was, “a crime-thriller, wrapped in a historical novel, with strong aspirations to literary fiction.” It’s a really great story, and among stiff competition (The dread…
In at least two previous posts I mentioned a post at The Society Pages which parses the orientalist cliches used in many “Asian” book-covers. I also noted this hadn’t seemed to take hold in Korean translations just yet (or at least the ones I have). Now, though… well.. let’s take a look. The Society Pages suggests the cliches…
I sat down between Mangwon and Hapjeong stations at a small coffee-shop/Italian restaurant (tragically no wine), to have an interview and dinner with Korean author Eun Hee-Kyung, who has had two works translated into English, My Wife’s Boxes and Poor Man’s Wife (a title which the author revealed she is not entirely pleased). Eun is…