Lim Chul-woo is an author of anguish (Thanks, Onyx!) and Straight Lines and Poison Gas – At the Hospital Wards, is nothing if not anguished. The novella focuses on (indirectly,so as not to get the author in trouble at the time) the Gwangju Massacre and the national attempt to pretend that it never happened. The…
Just in time for Halloween, Brother Anthony of Taize has put together Eerie Tales from Old Korea. The book is a compilation of stories collected by missionaries Homer B. Hulbert and James S. Gale. Hulbert and Gale were both fond of ghost stories and spent many years fruitlessly chasing down Korean ghost stories as scholars…
“Show me one soul that wasn’t to blame!” With the slam of a hand and a short sentence, a character in Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest sums up one of the bloodiest chapters in modern Korean history, and a moment that Hwang revisits decades later. That moment is a series of atrocities in Northern Korea that,…
Another great one from the LTI Korea/Dalkey Archive’s collection of novels! Lee Ki-ho’s At Least We Can Apologize is narrated by the simpleminded Jin-man, institutionalized as a young boy by his father. The institution he was left in is a horrible place, lorded over by two caretakers — nephews of the superintendent who runs it —…
As KTLIT tweeted yesterday (yes, you can follow KTLIT on twitter at @KTLIT): Park Wan-suh’s Lonesome You in @ltikorea /Dalkey Archive collection to publish November, is immediately the best selection of her work! And it is true, partly because Lonesome You is the most complete volume of Park Wan-suh’s (the way she chose to Romanize…
Stingray, by Kim Joo-Young (available for pre-order only!), translated by Louis and Inrae You Vinciguerra, is a tricky and ultimately rewarding piece of fiction which begins by taking you one way, in fact a quite traditional way, and then upping the ante by distorting those traditions. As Stingray begins, narrator Se-Young and his mother are…
NOTE: This book is currently only available for pre-order. Kim Won-il’s House With a Sunken Courtyard nearly redefines the genre of translated pundan munhak (separation literature) family fiction in Korea (LOL.. which is a lot of words to describe a ‘genre’). I hope, as I read my way through the galley’s of the Dalkey Archive…
Land of Excrement by Nam Jung-hyun is an interesting and unusual book from the Bilingual Edition of Modern Korean Fiction. The first thing of interest may be the title, which is super-tricky, even in Korean. The Korean title for this book is 분지, which normally means “valley,” in Korean. In fact, every Korean I showed…
Yi Mun-yol is, perhaps, one of Korea’s most under-rated writers, not because his writing is unknown, but because he has spent a large portion of his literary career out of step with the political winds of his time. And so it is in his short story, Pilon’s Pig. Pilon’s Pig is a short story that,…
The short story Stab (Stab Wound in literal translation) is something kind of different for Kim In-suk, at least in translation, as it is based in Korea – Kim is one of the few authors in Korea who routinely sites her stories overseas. It is also very short – only 53 pages of the book…