The Story of Hong Gildong

The quintessential Korean classic: the Robin Hood story of a magical boy who joins a group of robber bandits and becomes a king.

Selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post

The Story of Hong Gildong is arguably the single most important work of classic Korean fiction. A fantastic story of adventure, it has been adapted into countless movies, television shows, novels, and comics in Korea. Until now, the earliest and fullest text of this incredible fable has been inaccessible to English readers.
 
Hong Gildong, the brilliant but illegitimate son of a noble government minister, cannot advance in society due to his second-class status, so he leaves home and becomes the leader of a band of outlaws. On the way to building his own empire and gaining acceptance from his family, Hong Gildong vanquishes assassins, battles monsters, and conquers kingdoms. Minsoo Kang’s expressive and lively new translation finally makes the authoritative text of this premodern tale available in English, reintroducing a noble and righteous outlaw and sharing a beloved hallmark of Korean culture.

“Hong Gildong is an iconic figure in the Korean literary canon…He’s the mythic center of a sometimes-delightful, sometimes-unsettling tale, and it’s time the Western world gets to know him.” —NPR

“[A] marvel-filled swashbuckler…Besides being half fairy tale, half social protest novel, The Story of Hong Gildong possesses a profound resonance for modern Koreans.” —The Washington Post

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At Least We Can Apologize

“The Korean apology is satirized to harrowing effect in the darkly comic book.” —The New Yorker

“Flying out of far left field like some crazed winged gecko and climbing the padded walls in a white straitjacket, the twisted world of Lee Kiho's At Least We Can Apologize hits you like a bucket of cold water… To a modern Western reader, the sheer physicality of Lee Kiho's world can be a shock. Physical barbarity seeps through the paragraphs like sweat through a rag.” —Korea.net

This satirical 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.

Jin-man and Si-bong live at “the institution,” a disreputable mental ward that doubles as a sock-packaging plant. Fluorescent lights burn 24 hours a day and the staff subdues residents with pills. “When I first entered the institution I was beaten almost daily,” Jin-man recounts. “I was beaten in the morning, beaten at lunchtime, and beaten before bed.” As he goes through the menu of brutality, a certain giddiness sets in. But falsely confessing to random wrongdoing—swearing at their superiors, throwing out medication—results in milder punishment, so Jin-man and Si-bong learn to game the system.

A kaleidoscope of minor nuisances and major grievances, this novel heralds a new comic voice in Korean letters.

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The Hole

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine. Misery meets The Vegetarian in this psychological thriller about loneliness and the dark truths we try to bury.

In this tense, gripping novel by a star of Korean literature, Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house.

But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.

A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.

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The Good Son

“Ingeniously twisted.” —Entertainment Weekly, “Must List”

“Will leave even the most seasoned crime fiction readers guessing.” —CrimeReads

“[Jeong] maintains suspense about her inhuman-seeming protagonist’s fate until the bitter end.” —The Wall Street Journal

The Talented Mr. Ripley meets The Bad Seed in this breathless, chilling psychological thriller by the #1 bestselling novelist known as “Korea’s Stephen King” 

Who can you trust if you can’t trust yourself?
 
Early one morning, 26 year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell, and a phone call from his brother asking if everything’s all right at home—he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can’t remember much about the night before; having suffered from seizures for most of his life, Yu-jin often has trouble with his memory. All he has is a faint impression of his mother calling his name. But was she calling for help? Or begging for her life?
 
Thus begins Yu-jin’s frantic three-day search to uncover what happened that night, and to finally learn the truth about himself and his family. A shocking and addictive psychological thriller, The Good Son explores the mysteries of mind and memory, and the twisted relationship between a mother and son, with incredible urgency.

Named a Must-Read Book of the Summer by Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Bustle, CrimeReads, Lit Hub, The Millions, Electric Literature, and Brit + Co

(A special thank you to book club member, Sarah Howe for the group read suggestion.)

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The Vegetarian

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize

Named one of the best books of the year by The NY Times Book Review, Publisher’s Weekly, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly,  Time, Wall Street Journal, Bustle, Slate, Elle, The Economist, & Huffington Post 

Featured in the NY Times selection of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century” 

A beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul
 
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
 
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.

(A special thank you to book club member, Neha Mehta for the group read suggestion.)

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Please Look After Mom

Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

Kyung-Sook Shin is the author of numerous works of fiction and is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She was the first woman to be awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize.

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the group read suggestion.)

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City of Ash and Red

Named an NPR Great Read of 2018

From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a Kafkaesque tale of crime and punishment hailed by Korea’s Wall Street Journal as “an airtight masterpiece.”

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.

But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man’s loss of himself and his humanity.

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I'll Be Right There

Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I’ll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life. With profound intellectual and emotional insight, she revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.
 
Yoon’s formative experiences, which highlight both the fragility and force of personal connection in an era of absolute uncertainty, become immediately palpable. Shin makes the foreign and esoteric utterly familiar: her use of European literature as an interpreter of emotion and experience bridges any gaps between East and West.

”Shin writes wonderfully about intimacy and the longing of lonely people. ...I'll Be Right There is a hopeful work about the power of art, friendship and empathy to provide meaning to people's lives.” —LA Times

“Tender and mournful, the latest novel from best-selling South Korean novelist Shin (Please Look after Mom, 2011) considers young love and loss in an era of political ferment...Shin's uncomplicated yet allusive narrative voice delivers another calmly affecting story, simultaneously foreign and familiar.” —Kirkus

“Known for her beautiful imagery and lyrical prose…in I’ll Be Right There, Shin utilizes vivid, searing imagery…balanc[ing] the gentle beauty of language with bold images throughout her writing.” —Korean Quarterly

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Your Republic is Calling You

A foreign film importer, Gi-yeong is a family man with a wife and daughter. An aficionado of Heineken, soccer, and sushi, he is also a North Korean spy who has been living among his enemies for twenty-one years. Suddenly he receives a mysterious email, a directive seemingly from the home office. He has one day to return to headquarters. He hasn’t heard from anyone in over ten years. Why is he being called back now? Is this message really from Pyongyang? Is he returning to receive new orders or to be executed for a lack of diligence? Has someone in the South discovered his secret identity? Is this a trap?

Spanning the course of one day, Your Republic Is Calling You is an emotionally taut, psychologically astute, haunting novel that reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the way in which we sometimes never really know the people we love. Confronting moral questions on small and large scales, it mines the political and cultural transformations that have transformed South Korea since the 1980s. A lament for the fate of a certain kind of man and a certain kind of manhood, it is ultimately a searing study of the long and insidious effects of dividing a nation in two.

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Almond

An Amazon Best Book of May 2020

The Emissary meets The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime in this poignant and triumphant story about how love, friendship, and persistence can change a life forever.

This story is, in short, about a monster meeting another monster. 

One of the monsters is me.

Yunjae was born with a brain condition called Alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions like fear or anger. He does not have friends—the two almond-shaped neurons located deep in his brain have seen to that—but his devoted mother and grandmother provide him with a safe and content life. Their little home above his mother’s used bookstore is decorated with colorful Post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say “thank you,” and when to laugh.

Then on Christmas Eve—Yunjae’s sixteenth birthday—everything changes. A shocking act of random violence shatters his world, leaving him alone and on his own. Struggling to cope with his loss, Yunjae retreats into silent isolation, until troubled teenager Gon arrives at his school, and they develop a surprising bond.

As Yunjae begins to open his life to new people—including a girl at school—something slowly changes inside him. And when Gon suddenly finds his life at risk, Yunjae will have the chance to step outside of every comfort zone he has created to perhaps become the hero he never thought he would be.

Readers of Wonder by R.J. Palaccio and Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig will appreciate this “resonant” story that “gives Yunjae the courage to claim an entirely different story.” (Booklist, starred review)

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First Person Sorrowful

Ko Un has long been a living legend in Korea, both as a poet and as a person. Allen Ginsberg once wrote, “Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.”

When a writer has published as much as Ko Un has in the course of more than fifty years of writing, it is hard to know where to begin, what to translate. For this collection, his translators have selected a hundred or so poems from the five collections published since 2002, collections acclaimed by Korean critics as bringing poetry to a new level of cosmic reference. Nothing shows more clearly his stature as a writer than the variety of themes and emotions found in his most recent work. Readers here have access for the first time to many of the poems Ko Un has produced in the 21st century, as he approaches his eightieth year, his energy and originality unabated.

As Michael McLure wrote years ago: “Ko Un's poetry has the old-fashionedness of a muddy rut on a country road after rain, and yet it is also as state-of-the-art as a DNA micro-chip.” That remains true today.

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There a Petal Silently Falls

“Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

In this collection's title work, ‘There a Petal Silently Falls,’ Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. ‘Whisper Yet’ illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, ‘The Thirteen-Scent Flower,’ satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances.

Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.”

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No Flower Blooms without Wavering

Do Jong-Hwan is one of Korea’s most beloved poets. Through his poetry, Do Jong-Hwan depicts nature and beauty interwoven with a touch of melancholy and hope. He offers glimpses of wisdom with lessons learned from life’s greatest joys and deepest pains. This explains why so many people appreciate them—for the courage the poems give when life is difficult, when joy seems far away.

Where have flowers bloomed but never trembled?
Even those most beautiful
all trembled as they blossomed,
and as they shook, stalks grew firm.
Where is there a love which is never shaken?

Where have flowers bloomed though never been made wet?
Even those most brightly sparkling
were soaked and soaked again as they blossomed.
Battered by wind and rain, their petals opened warmly.
Where is there a life which has never been drenched?

The poet lost his wife at a young age to cancer and the love, pain, and sadness he feels is also seen in this beautiful collection.

Today there is
no sign of you,
who turned into a star
and lingered a while
outside the window

Critics and readers alike adore Do Jong-Hwan and this collection of his best poems make it clear why he’s so beloved. This new publication offers the additional advantage of being bilingual, so that readers also have access to the original texts of the poems.

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Human Acts

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award & named one of the best books of 2017 by Amazon, The Atlantic, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, & Huffington Post

From the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian, a “rare and astonishing” (The Observer) portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
 
The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.
 
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.”

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Confession of the Lioness

A finalist for the Man Booker International Prize & shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award

“A dark, poetic mystery about the women of the remote village of Kulumani and the lionesses that hunt them.

Told through two haunting, interwoven diaries, Mia Couto's Confession of the Lioness reveals the mysterious world of Kulumani, an isolated village in Mozambique whose traditions and beliefs are threatened when ghostlike lionesses begin hunting the women who live there.

Mariamar, a woman whose sister was killed in a lioness attack, finds her life thrown into chaos when the outsider Archangel Bullseye, the marksman hired to kill the lionesses, arrives at the request of the village elders. Mariamar's father imprisons her in her home, where she relives painful memories of past abuse and hopes to be rescued by Archangel. Meanwhile, Archangel tracks the lionesses in the wilderness, but when he begins to suspect there is more to them than meets the eye, he starts to lose control of his hands. The hunt grows more dangerous, until it's no safer inside Kulumani than outside it. As the men of Kulumani feel increasingly threatened by the outsider, the forces of modernity upon their traditional culture, and the danger of their animal predators closing in, it becomes clear the lionesses might not be real lionesses at all but spirits conjured by the women themselves.

Both a riveting mystery and a poignant examination of women's oppression, Confession of the Lioness explores the confrontation between the modern world and ancient traditions to produce an atmospheric, gripping novel.”

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The First Wife

“This is a powerful and angry book. The writing is urgent and surprising.” —Reading the World

“After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double—or rather, a quintuple—life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other families for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband's duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women—as well as an additional lover—according to polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights.

In this funny and feverishly scathing critique, a major work from Mozambique's first published female novelist, Paulina Chiziane explores her country's traditional culture, its values and hypocrisy, and the subjection of women the world over.”

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Neighbours

“On the eve of the Muslim festival of Eid, Narguiss, who 'never wanted anything to do with politics', is more preoccupied with family problems than with the radio news of kidnappings and murders. Nearby, Leia, Januário and their young daughter are caught up in the pleasure and security of finally finding a flat of their own, while Mena, who was once the beauty of her village, overhears her husband plotting murder.

Before dawn, these innocent people seeking to lead peaceful lives are thrown together in a vicious conspiracy to infiltrate and destabilise Mozambique. Skilfully weaving together present events and age-old traditions through narrative 'snapshots', Lília Momplé gives us, in the drama of a few short hours, an insight into the consequences of Mozambique's complex history.”

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Tuner of Silences

A Radio France-Culture/Télérama best work of fiction by the winner of the Camões Prize and Neustadt Prize

Highly acclaimed by the NY Times

”Mwanito was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears.

Mwanito has been living in a former big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He’s been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, that they wait for an apology from God. Mwanito has been told that crying and praying are the same thing. Both, it seems, are forbidden.

The eighth novel by the internationally bestselling Couto, The Tuner of Silences is the story of Mwanito’s struggle to reconstruct a family history that his father is unable to discuss. With the young woman’s arrival, however, the silence of the past quickly breaks down, and both his father’s story and the world are heard once more.

The Tuner of Silences has been published to acclaim in more than half a dozen countries. Now in its first English translation, this story of an African boy's quest for the truth endures as a magical, humanizing confrontation between one child and the legacy of war.”

”A phenomenal book … a paragon of contemporary African literature ... some of the most beautiful and moving prose being written today.” ―Words without Borders

“Brookshaw dexterously renders the novel's colloquial Portuguese into lively English…a task is made more exacting by the quality of Couto's brilliance.” —The New York Times

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Ualalapi

Named one of Africa’s hundred best books of the twentieth century, Ualalapi reflects on Mozambique’s past and present through interconnected narratives related to the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, Ngungunhane. Defeated by the Portuguese in 1895, Ngungunhane was reclaimed for propaganda purposes by Mozambique’s post-independence government as a national and nationalist hero. The regime celebrated his resistance to the colonial occupation of southern Mozambique as a precursor to the twentieth-century struggle for independence.

In Ualalapi, Ungulani challenges that ideological celebration and portrays Ngungunhane as a despot, highlighting the violence and tyranny that were hallmarks of the Gaza Empire. This fresh look at the history of late nineteenth-century southeast Africa provides a prism through which to examine the machinations of those in power in Mozambique during the 1980s.

“An English translation of this undisputed masterpiece of modern Mozambican fiction comes very welcome indeed. Both the translation and the foreword provide the Anglophone reader with an excellent introduction to the work of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, offering a compelling historical vision of peoples and cultures in the crucible of conflict.” —Hilary Owen, University of Oxford/University of Manchester

”Ualalapi endures as one of the most compelling historical novels produced in post-independence Mozambique. . . . Khosa’s narrative exudes a foreboding and multifarious end-of-the-world mood.” —Luís Madureira, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Woman of the Ashes

Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize

Alternating between two voices in both an oral and letter format, this is the first in a trilogy about the last emperor of southern Mozambique

“Southern Mozambique, 1894. Sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portuguese conquest of territory claimed by Ngungunyane, the last of the leaders of the state of Gaza, the second-largest empire led by an African. Ngungunyane has raised an army to resist colonial rule and with his warriors is slowly approaching the border village.

Desperate for help, Germano enlists Imani, a 15 year-old girl, to act as his interpreter. But when he develops romantic feelings for her, he fears that the attraction will compromise his mission. She belongs to the VaChopi tribe, one of the few who dared side with the Portuguese. But while one of her brothers fights for the Crown of Portugal, the other has chosen the African emperor. Standing astride two kingdoms, Imani is drawn to Germano, just as he is drawn to her. But she knows that in a country haunted by violence, the only way out for a woman is to go unnoticed, as if made of shadows or ashes. 

Alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Woman of the Ashes combines vivid folkloric prose, magical realism, and extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century.”

(A special thank you to book club member, Eydis West for the group read suggestion.)

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