Publisher Oxford University Press hails Activism and Post-activism as the first-ever English language work on the birth and development of South Korean nonfiction film. Drawing on more than 200 films and videos, Jihoon Kim’s trailblazing book charts the history of documentary filmmaking in the South from its early “activism” period in the 1980s to what the author calls its modern “post-activism” period in the late ’90s and 2000s. In doing so, Kim highlights the work of marginalized groups—including women, sexual minorities, and the working class—who, without the ease of access modern technolog ..read more

Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the colonial era (published from 1936 to 1941) and four in the postwar period (published from 1946 to 1952). Apart from “Walking in the Rain”, which she published in a bilingual edition in 2015, the stories in this book are available in English for the first time. Choe Myon ..read more

Examining the omnipresence of grief and revolution in South Korea for women and the queer community, as well as the whole nation after the sinking of the MV Sewol in April 2014, Hwang Jungeun’s dd’s Umbrella presents twin novellas from the perspective of two distinct narrators. The first story, simply titled “d”, follows a gender-nonconforming character named d as they navigate tragic events, from the sudden death of their partner dd to the Sewol ferry disaster that left 300 dead. “There Is Nothing that Needs to Be Said”, the subsequent story, is told from the first-person perspective of Kim S ..read more

The Band, Christine Ma-Kellams (Atria, April 2034) This whip-smart, darkly funny, and biting debut follows a psychologist with a savior complex who offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol on the run. Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of global superstardom. But when his latest solo single accidentally leads to controversy, he’s abruptly cancelled. To spare the band from fallout with obsessive fans and overbearing management, Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of a Chinese American woman he meets in a Los Angel ..read more

Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film, Christopher P Hanscom (Columbia University Press, March 2024) In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as if they were before our very eyes. Christopher P Hanscom questions this understanding of politic ..read more

If one seeks to characterize “Asian-American writing” as something other than just the ethnicity of the author, one might well land on Gina Chung’s short story collection Green Frog as a sort of case-in-point, if not a model. This is American writing, populated with American protagonists (albeit of Korean extraction) dealing with American issues in (almost entirely) American settings, in an American idiom, yet inflected through Chung’s Korean heritage and literally through smatterings of the Korean language. Korea, here, is the “old country”, a place of parents, grandparents, comfort food, and ..read more

Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants, SunAh M Laybourn (NYU Press, January 2024) Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees’ position as family members did not automatically ensure legal, cultural, or social citizenship. Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, la ..read more

The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that—in theory—could return at any point.   ..read more

A sprawling, multigenerational epic, Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10 tells the story of a working-class Korean family and details their struggles against the tides of the 20th century, from the Japanese colonial era through the division of the Peninsula to South Korea’s economic boom. Their agitation for workers’ rights spans the generations, as does the unique ability of the family’s women to speak and affect events from beyond the grave, both of which define the family and mark the epochs of the story.  The story begins with the scion of the current generation, Jino, climbing to the top of ..read more

Although the stories in Paul Yoon’s latest collection range from northern Vermont and the Costa Brava to the Russian Far East, and chronologically from 17th-century Japan to more less the present day, with stops along the way in Tsarist Russia and the Cold War, they all feature protagonists who are Korean in one way or another. But the superficial complexities in The Hive and the Honey belie the simplicity of Yoon’s language and his skill at his craft. The seven stories in this (all too) brief collection provide ample justification for Yoon’s reputation as a stylist. One story, and one of the ..read more