Korean Literature

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. Two rival countries race to raise the tallest flag. A poet receives a grant letter that's made to self-destruct. A world confederation of liars welcomes new members. Always instructive but never didactic, Song's stories are characterized by a lightness of touch that allows laughter to accompany even the darkest truths in this collection.

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. They represent the many sounds sampled by the author when he recorded over 600 kinds of musical instruments. Like instruments coming together in a symphony, the stories combine to make an opus consisting of variations on a theme. While the stories begin in an upbeat fashion and work to a crescendo, they end with notes in a minor key filling the vacuum. The Library of Musical Instruments is a collection to contemplate on more than one occasion.

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. Through the beauty that penetrates and captivates us in fleeting moments, the novel leads us to critically reflect on the question of what true beauty is in a world where people are captivated by the beauty of advertising models in a flood of new products. In that respect, Mannequin, as the title implies, is a sad allegory on a capitalistic society in which a woman's body, artificial and standardized, becomes a product.

Turbid River was written just before Ch'ae Man-Sik was arrested in 1938 by the Japanese colonial government. Like the two novels that followed (Peace Under Heaven and Frozen Fish), Turbid River 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.

Beauty Looks Down On Me is a collection of by turns sad and funny stories about the thwarted expectations of the young as they grow older. HeeKyung's characters are misfits who by virtue of their bodies or their lack of social status are left to dream of momentous changes that will never come. Unsatisfied with work, with family, with friends, they lose themselves in diets, books, and blogs. Heekyung's collection humorously but humanely depicts the loneliness and monotony found in many modern lives.

Evening Proposal is a collection of eight stories about the grim and often faceless nature of urban life. Faintly reminiscent of Franz Kafka, the stories range from a man who discovers that his job performance has no significance while taking refuge in taking care of an abandoned rabbit to a man who finally expresses his love to discover that his expression frightened him more than his fear in anticipating the event. Evening Proposal reissues the warning that the orderliness and system that civilization created in order to confront nature's chaos is in fact "the hell of monotony."