In these inventive short stories, characters must navigate an impossible world: America as we know it. Two estranged brothers on a road trip attempt to reconcile but end up at a Revolutionary War reenactment camp; a young woman moves in with her boyfriend and discovers an eerily personalized seduction manual on his bookshelf; a middle-aged Korean-American father attends college courses and is either blessed or haunted by the presence of Edward Moon, an eccentric billionaire who also happens to be "the most successful Korean in America."
Playfully engaging with genres like science fiction, the fairy tale, and the Gothic tale, the interconnected short stories of Impossible Children pit tiny heroes against tiny villains; the result is a stunning mapping of geography, heritage, immigration, freedom, and the mysterious forces behind epic ruins and epic successes.
"As hard as Robert Yune's characters try to escape their Korean heritage and disappear into a rootless America, they can't run from blood. As one laments, Sooner or later, everything returns, yet there seems no way to reassemble the once-missing pieces and become whole again. With a clear-eyed grace, Impossible Children chronicles a generation struggling to bear the weight of their inheritance."
Stewart O'Nan, author of Henry, Himself
"The characters at the heart of Robert Yune's vibrant debut story collection, Impossible Children, are treated with such warmth, such sincerity, that the reader is genuinely engrossed by every twist and turn of their extraordinary lives-though especially by their dreams of America, both ones that come true and those they heartrendingly abandon. Written in voices that show a breadth of immigrant ex
Jeffrey Condran, author of Prague Summer
"Robert Yune's collage of stories is a raucous and dangerous carnival, a funhouse of mirrors that reflects American life back to us as a Korean-American immigrant experience. Through life-altering accidents, tense road trips with estranged siblings, torment via karoake, weaponized proverbs, and sinister billionaire CEOs, Yune explores and transforms the familiar into the surreal, calls upon us to
Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
