Bøger i Library of Korean Literature serien

Evening Proposal is a collection of eight stories about the grim and often faceless nature of urban life.

This collection of eight stories¿cynical and sympathetic by turns¿represents the author's attempt to document and understand the conflicts, resentments, hatreds, and anxieties of contemporary family life. The title story depicts a mother's busy day playing numerous roles¿ashamed, fearless, or humble¿depending on which member of her family she's tending to. In "The Privacy of My Father," a daughter tracks her father to Hong Kong in order to spy on what she thinks is an illicit affair. All in all, says Seo Hajin, family means deception--but these masks aren't so easily removed.

Communication or the lack thereof is the subject of this sly update of the picaresque.

Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world and often compared to Kafka, Jung Young-moon s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad.

The Private Life of Plants is about the ways in which desire can both worsen and mitigate our flaws. We meet amputee sons whose mothers cart them from brothel to brothel; we meet brothers who love their brother's lovers, and whose lovers in turn are stolen away by the husbands of their sisters. Sexuality in all its ugliness and wonder is put under the microscope by Lee Seung-U, who reminds us that love may come in various forms, but that it is, nonetheless, a force that unifies us all . . . whether we like it or not.

"Originally published in Korean as Nae adul ui yonin by Munhad Tongne, Paju, 2008"--Title page verso.

This story focuses on an agency whose only purpose is to offer apologies-for a fee-on behalf of its clients. This seemingly insignificant service leads us into an examination of sin, guilt, and the often irrational demands of society. A kaleidoscope of minor nuisances and major grievances, this novel heralds a new comic voice in Korean letters.

Hailed by critics, Stingray has been described by its author as "e;a critical biography of my loving mother."e; With his father having abandoned his family for another woman, Se-young and his mother are forced to subsist on their own in the harsh environment of a small Korean farming village in the 1950s. Determined to wait for her husband's return, Se-young's mother hangs a dried stingray on the kitchen doorjamb; to her, it's a reminder of the fact that she still has a husband, and that she must behave as a married woman would, despite all. Also, she claims, when the family is reunited, the fish will be their first, celebratory meal together. But when a beggar girl, Sam-rae, sneaks into their house during a blizzard, the first thing she does is eat the stingray, and what follows is a struggle, at once sentimental and ideological, for the soul of the household.

An autobiographical novel that takes a life to pieces, putting forward not a coherent, straightforward narrative, but a series of dazzling images ranging from the ordinary to the unbelievable, fished from the depths of the author's memory as well as from the stream of his day-to-day life as an adult author. Interweaving flashes of the horrific Jeju Uprising and the Korean War with pleasant family anecdotes, stories of schoolroom cruelty, and bizarre digressions into his personal mythology, One Spoon on this Earth stands a sort of digest of contemporary Korean history as it might be seen through the lens of one man's life and opinions.

First published in 1990, this is a sensational and highly controversial novel by one of Korea's most electrifying contemporary authors. A preposterous coming-of-age story, melding sex, death, and high school in a manner reminiscent of some perverse collision between Georges Bataille and Beverly Cleary, the narrator of this book plows through contemporaneous Korean mores with aplomb, bound for destruction, or maturity-whichever comes first.

An occasionally terrifying and always vivid portrayal of what it was like to live as a refugee immediately after the end of the Korean War. This novel is based on the author's own experience in his early teens in Daegu, in 1954, and depicts six families that survive the hard times together in the same house, weathering the tiny conflicts of interest and rivalries that spring up in such close quarters, but nonetheless offering one another sympathy and encouragement as fellow sufferers of the same national misfortune: brothers and sisters in privation.

Well before her death in 2011, Park Wan-Suh had established herself as a canonical figure in Korean literature. Her work-often based upon her own personal experiences, and showing keen insight into divisive social issues from the Korean partition to the position of women in Korean society-has touched readers for over forty years. In this collection, meditations upon life in old age come to the fore-at its best, accompanied by great beauty and compassion; at its worst by a cynicism that nonetheless turns a bitter smile upon the changing world.

A major, never before translated novel by the author of Mujong / The Heartless-often called the first modern Korean novel-The Soil tells the story of an idealist dedicating his life to helping the inhabitants of the rural community in which he was raised. Striving to influence the poor farmers of the time to improve their lots, become self-reliant, and thus indirectly change the reality of colonial life on the Korean peninsula, The Soil was vitally important to the social movements of the time, echoing the effects and reception of such English-language novels as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Rina is a defector from a country that might be North Korea, traversing an "empty and futile" landscape. Along the way, she is forced to work at a chemical plant, murders a few people, becomes a prostitute, runs a lucrative bar, and finds a solace in a motley family of wanderers all as disenfranchised as she.

The Amusing Life is a collection of over forty stories, sketches, vignettes and fables that search out the comical, even the absurd, aspects of everyday life. Along the way, the conventions and mores of work, art, nation, love and family are examined and made newly strange.

Ch'oe Yun's Mannequin is a novel that reflects on the meaning of beauty and its many facets of existence. The beauty of the main character, Jini, is captured through a carefree imagination that describes it as "the music of the wind," or something that can't be described in words.

The second short-story collection by Kim Jung-hyuk, the author of Penguin News, features a total of eight short stories, including "Syncopation D" which won the 2nd Kim You-jeong Literary Award in 2008.

Turbid Rivers was written just before Ch'ae Man-Sik was arrested in 1938 by the Japanese colonial government. It is a realistic portrayal of life in Korea under Japanese colonization. The tragic story of a woman's life, the novel is also a penetrating look into the objectification of women.

Set in San Francisco, A Contrived World recounts the author's visit to the mythic Californian city. While the novel is based in this real experience, the narrator's imaginative reflections cause the narrative to balloon outward into the realms of fiction and fantasy. A mirthful anti-novel that fuses observation and reflection.

The nine stories that make up this collection depict a wide variety of contemporary Koreans navigating a world focused on material wealth and social power, in which family ties have been disrupted and all relationships are dysfunctional.