New Books

Behind the Gun : Poncho's Last Walk
Slane, Stephen, author
Each purchase directly benefits America's Warfighters through Infidel Inc. and other Veteran nonprofits.A Memoir detailing the US involvement in Somalia, the first known confrontations with Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, a unique account of October 3rd & 4th, and the beginning of the War on Terror. The book follows the 87th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division from the start of Operation Restore Hope through it's climactic finish on October 3rd and 4th 1993, and the Battle of Mogadishu. This is the story that America never heard, and the story America needs to hear.This book began as self-therapy for the author in his battle against PTSD, and morphed into a true American odyssey of military history.Infidel Inc. has spent 2 years helping veterans help themselves and has worked to prevent veteran suicide, while also providing direct financial assistance to America's warfighters. Their goal is to build a retreat as they continue to help our warriors find peace after returning from war. Follow Bravo Charles from Behind the Gun across Somalia. - Stephen Slane (Bravo Charles)

A lesser love
Koh, EJ, 1988-
A Lesser Love is a book of love poems and elegies for those who have fumbled and stumbled and disappointed. These are poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, even countries and communities. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh has descibred her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. This spirit of jeong permeates this book of poems that are astonishing in the connections they draw and the ties they bind. In A Lesser Love readers will find poems composed of Ingredients for Memories that Can Be Used as Explosives and poems composed of chemistry equations that convert light into reasonable dioxide and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. A book of intimate poems that invite readers into a private world, that geography grows wider and more interconnected with each passing page. Through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers, we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, they hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope. With evocative lyricism and profound emotional intensity Koh has crafted a book of poems that charm and delight and profoundly enrich.

Almond : a novel
Son, Wŏn-p'yŏng, 1979- author.
Yunjae was born with a brain condition called Alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions like fear or anger. He lives with his mother and grandmother above their used bookstore, decorated with colorful post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say "thank you," and when to laugh. When a shocking act of random violence shatters his world, it leaves him alone and on his own. Yunjae retreats into silent isolation, until troubled teenager Gon arrives at his school and begins to bully Yunjae. After learning they have more in common than they realized, the two strike up a surprising friendship. -- adapted from jacket

Blackacre
Youn, Monica, author.
* A Publishers Weekly Fall 2016 Top 10 Poetry Selection * *One of Brooklyn Magazines 100 Books to Read in 2016 * Blackacre is a centuries-old legal fictiona placeholder name for a hypothetical estate. Treacherously lush or alluringly bleak, these poems reframe their subjects as landscape, as legacya bereavement, an intimacy, a racial identity, a pubescence, a culpability, a diagnosis. With a surveyors keenest tools, Youn marks the boundaries of the given, what we have been allotted: acreage that has been ruthlessly fenced, previously tenanted, ploughed and harvested, enriched and depleted. In the title sequence, the poet gleans a second crop from the field of Miltons great sonnet on his blindness: a lyric meditation on her barrenness, on her own desireher own struggleto conceive a child. What happens when the transformative imagination comes up against the limits of unalterable fact?

Carving status at Kŭmgangsan : elite graffiti in premodern Korea
Stiller, Maya K. H., author.
"North Korea's Kŭmgangsan is one of Asia's most celebrated sacred mountains, comparable in fame to Mount Tai in China and Mount Fuji in Japan. The late Chosŏn (1650-1900) Korean elite went to Kŭmgangsan on pilgrimages to demonstrate and defend their high social status. Travelers used the mountain to cultivate practices such as naming sites, carving rock inscriptions, and joining a literary lineage. In pilgrimage, they sought an extraordinary experience that could be made only at a particular, nonsubstitutable site; they went on a journey of more than two weeks, following a prescribed route; and they journeyed to a locale that held significance for their religious, political, social, or cultural identity. Some Kŭmgangsan travelers expanded on the prescribed circular route to further demonstrate their social status, engaging with locales by leaving documentation of their visit. Based on multidisciplinary research drawing on literary writings, court records, gazetteers, maps, songs, and paintings, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan transcends the traditional dichotomies between pilgrim and tourist by reconceptualizing pilgrimage in the premodern Korean context. The book will appeal to scholars in fields ranging from East Asian history, literature, and geography, to pilgrimage studies and art history"--

Catcalling : [poems]
Yi, So-ho (Poet), author.
A blistering, expansive debut collection addressing sexual violence, #MeToo, and familial violence from one of the hottest new voices in Korean poetry.

Cold War cosmopolitanism : period style in 1950s Korean cinema
Klein, Christina, 1963- author.
South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many Golden Age cinemas that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the eras most glamorous and popular womens pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Hans films took shape within a free world network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War by the CIA, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Hans sophisticated style with careful attention to key issues of modernitysuch as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerismin the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director. A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

DMZ colony
Choi, Don Mee, author.
"A new book by Don Mee Choi that includes poems, prose, and images"--

Dictee
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, author.
This autobiographical work is the story of several women. Deploying a variety of texts, documents and imagery, these women are united by suffering and the transcendance of suffering.

East goes West : the making of an oriental Yankee
Kang, Younghill, 1898-1972, author.
"Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, the young, idealistic Chungpa Han arrives in a New York teeming with expatriates, businessmen, students, scholars, and indigents. Struggling to support his studies, he travels throughout the United States and Canada, becoming by turns a traveling salesman, a domestic worker, and a farmer, and observing along the way the idealism, greed, and shifting values of the industrializing twentieth century. Part picaresque adventure, part shrewd social commentary, East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation. It is a masterpiece not only of Asian American literature but also of American literature"--

Floating, brilliant, gone : poems
Choi, Franny, author.
In her electrifying debut, Franny Choi leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility,

Hardly war
Choi, Don Mee, author.
Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Healing historical trauma in South Korean film and literature
Choi, Chungmoo, author.
Through South Korean filmic and literary texts, this book explores affect and ethics in the healing of historical trauma, as alternatives to the measures of transitional justice in want of national unity. Historians and legal practitioners who deal with transitional justice agree that the relationship between historiography and justice seeking is contested: this book reckons with this question of how much truth-telling from a violent past will lead to healing, forgiving, forgetting and finally overcoming resentment. Nuanced interpretations of South Korean filmic and literary texts are featured, including Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, Bong Joon-ho's Mother and literary texts of Han Kang and Ch'oe Yun, whilst also engaging the ethical and political philosophy of Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and others. Also offered is new and extensive research into the hitherto hidden history of thousands of North Korean war orphans who were sent to Eastern European countries for care. Grappling with the evils of history, the films and novels examined herein find their ultimate themes in compassion, hospitality, humility and solidarity of the wounded. Healing Historical Trauma in South Korean Film and Literature will appeal to students and scholars of film, comparative literature, cultural studies and Korean studies more broadly.

Hegemonic mimicry : Korean popular culture of the twenty-first century
Kim, Kyung Hyun, 1969- author.
In Hegemonic Mimicry, Kyung Hyun Kim considers the recent global success of Korean popular culture--the Korean wave of pop music, cinema, and television also known as hallyu--from a transnational and transcultural perspective. Using the concept of mimicry to think through hallyu's adaptation of American sensibilities and genres, he shows how the commercialization of Korean popular culture has upended the familiar dynamic of major-to-minor cultural influence, enabling hallyu to become a dominant global cultural phenomenon. At the same time, its worldwide popularity has rendered its Korean-ness opaque. Kim argues that Korean cultural subjectivity over the past two decades is one steeped in ethnic rather than national identity. Explaining how South Korea leapt over the linguistic and cultural walls surrounding a supposedly

Homing : an affective topography of ethnic Korean return migration
Jo, Ji-Yeon O., 1968- author.
Millions of ethnic Koreans have been driven from the Korean Peninsula over the course of the region's modern history. Emigration was often the personal choice of migrants hoping to escape economic and political hardship, but it was also enforced or encouraged by governmental relocation and migration projects in both colonial and postcolonial times. The turning point in South Korea's overall migration trajectory occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the nation's increased economic prosperity and global visibility, along with shifting geopolitical relationships between the First World and Second World, precipitated a migration flow to South Korea. Since the early 1990s, South Korea's foreign-resident population has soared more than 3,000 percent. Homing investigates the experiences of legacy migrants--later-generation diaspora Koreans who

Imperial citizens : Koreans and race from Seoul to LA
Kim, Nadia Y., author.
Examines how immigrants acquire American ideas about race, both pre- and post-migration, in light of U.S. military presence and U.S. cultural dominance over their home country, drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations of Koreans in Seoul and Los Angeles.

Korea : a history
Park, Eugene Y., author.
This book is a comprehensive account of Korean history from early times to December 2020.

Korean contemporary art
Kim, Miki Wick.
"This unique survey examines the contemporary art scene in Korea, which is one of the most dynamic and least known areas of the contemporary art world. The works of today's Korean artists are rarely found between the pages of any general art book, yet they have become a major force in the global art world. Korea is rich with internationally renowned painters, photographers, and multi-media artists. This book features Korea's most talented and prolific artists and their works, from the powerful and grand-scale installations of Do Ho Suh and the eye-popping sculptures of Choi Jeong-Hwa to the minimalist performance of Kimsooja, and the intellectually challenging videos and sculptures of Michael Joo. The artists' diverse bodies of work often deal with issues relating to tradition, politics, society, alienation, identity, and popular culture. This generously illustrated and engagingly written volume offers a concise introduction to the world of contemporary Korean art"--Publisher's website.

Korean modern : the matter of identity : an exploration into modern architecture in an East Asian country
Rowe, Peter G., author.
The development of modern architecture in Korea and, more recently, South Korea, is closely tied to the country's dramatic transformations since the late 19th century. The authors interrogate major periods from the Late Joseon Dynasty to the vibrant democratic present, showing how architecture, by making technological and stylistic leaps, has played a important role in the construction of the nation's identity. The architectural analyses, ranging from Hwaseong Fortress to 21st-century constructions like Paju Book City, Ssamziegil Shopping Center, the Boutique Monaco skyscraper, and the Bauzium Sculpture Museum, focus on buildings in which the formation of a specifically Korean modernism is particularly observable. The appendix includes biographical descriptions of major architectural figures.

Korean skilled workers : toward a labor aristocracy
Kim, Hyung-A, 1948- author.
"Korean Skilled Workers is the first book to systematically examine the sociopolitical trajectory of South Korea's skilled workers in heavy and chemical industries (HCI). Following the commencement of the Park Chung Hee regime's HCI project in 1972, the Great Workers' Struggle of 1987, and subsequent union militancy, a "labor aristocracy" evolved. In contrast to the uncertain situation of millions of nonregular workers in South Korea today, regular workers achieved guaranteed job security, superior wages, and other benefits. Research on Korean workers has focused on their struggle against political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural prejudice. In contrast, this study demonstrates that the most enduring struggle of Korea's industrial workers was for wage increases and stable employment, not for a wider revolutionary socialist movement. Korean Skilled Workers draws on archival records and in-depth interviews of HCI workers of three main heavy manufacturing firms (including Hyundai Heavy Industry) to portray these individuals and their vastly changed collective trajectory, showing how their paths embody the consequences of Korea's rapid development, such as the shift from state-led to chaebŏl-led capital accumulation and the limits of a broad-based labor solidarity in the context of a counter-offensive against the strength of the radical unionism of the 1980s"--

Korean wild geese families : the dynamics of gender, family, and legal dynamics of middle-class Asian transnational families in North America
Lee, Se Hwa, 1978- author.
Korean Wild Geese Families explores gender, family, social, and legal dynamics of Korean

Love in the big city : a novel
Pak, Sang-yŏng, 1988- author.
A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul

Media, culture, and debate in Korean : a roadmap for advanced-level Korean = Midiŏ, munhwa, t'oron ŭl t'onghan kogŭp Han'gugŏ suŏp
Chang, Seung-Eun, author.
Media, Culture, and Debate in Korean provides a roadmap for an advanced-level Korean course centered around media and culture and includes access to an archive of virtual media resources such as film, documentary, shows, newspaper, drama, music, and advertising. The book is designed to help students enhance their language skills and to deepen their knowledge and understanding of contemporary Korean society and culture through the analysis of authentic Korean media resources and debate. It addresses the cultural issues permeating Korean society that are rapidly transforming people's perspectives, language, and lifestyle. These societal issues are discussed in the context of historical and psychological background, the struggle between tradition and changing values, positive and negative impact of the phenomenon, neologism, and potential solutions. This book can serve as a main textbook as well as a resource for an online class setting and can also be used in a traditional face-to-face class setting.

Minor feelings : an Asian American reckoning
Hong, Cathy Park, author.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER ONE OF TIMES 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee One of Times 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocativeand its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hongs theory of minor feelings. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these minor feelings occur when American optimism contradicts your own realitywhen you believe the lies youre told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, theyre dissonantand in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poets searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psycheand of a writers search to both uncover and speak the truth. Praise for Minor Feelings Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.The New York Times Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.Newsweek Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.Salon

Ordinary misfortunes
Yoon, Emily Jungmin, author.
Poetry. Korea continues to grapple with the shared memory of its Japanese and US occupations. The poems in ORDINARY MISFORTUNES incorporate actual testimony about cruelty against vulnerable bodies--including the wianbu, euphemistically known as

Our happy time
Kong, Chi-yŏng, 1963- author.
After surviving her third suicide attempt, Yu-Jung accompanies her no-nonsense aunt, a nun, on a charitable visit to death row where she meets a convicted murderer, and over several weeks Yu-Jung and the prisoner reveal the dark secrets of their pasts and the hidden traumas that have shaped their lives. Original.

Pachappa Camp : the first Koreatown in the United States
Chang, Edward T., author.
Pachappa Camp: The First Koreatown in the United States proves through new research that Dosan Ahn Chang Ho established the first Koreatown in the United States in Riverside, California in 1905. Pachappa Camp studies the development of the camp and the lives of its residents.

Parameters of disavowal : colonial representation in South Korean cinema
An, Jinsoo, 1968- author.
"The colonial experience of the twentieth century from 1910 to 1945 shaped the culture and identity of Korea, yet the manner in which South Korean postcolonial cinema depicts this troubling past has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Parameters of Disavowal seeks to break this hiatus. It approaches the subject of the colonial past in South Korean cinema as a particular kind of postcolonial knowledge production that responds to the repercussions of Cold War geopolitics while also subscribing to the precept of anticolonial nationalism. It advances beyond manifest readings of anticolonial messages by examining how postcolonial cinema not only posits, but also constructs Korean national history through disavowals and elisions of the very past they wish to represent. In particular, this book focuses on how South Korean films have created ways of seeing and imagining the colonial past by privileging certain Korean sites as spaces generating unique meanings and values contrary to the assumed total domination of the colonial power. These films thereby inscribe colonial power within parameters of disavowal, ultimately rendering it delimited, incomplete, and flawed. This unique cinematic mode of visualization, the author argues, has shaped historical thinking about Korea's colonial past and demands further investigation of the relationship between politics and aesthetics in cinema"--Provided by publisher.

Religion and spirituality in Korean America

An introductory analysis of Korean American religious practices and community

Rules of the house : family law and domestic disputes in colonial Korea
Lim, Sungyun, 1977- author.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Presss Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Rules of the House offers a dynamic revisionist account of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (19101945) by examining the roles of women in the civil courts. Challenging the dominant view that women were victimized by the Japanese family laws and its patriarchal biases, Sungyun Lim argues that Korean women had to struggle equally against Korean patriarchal interests. Moreover, women were not passive victims; instead, they proactively struggled to expand their rights by participating in the Japanese colonial legal system. In turn, the Japanese doctrine of promoting progressive legal rights would prove advantageous to them. Following female plaintiffs and their civil disputes from the precolonial Choson dynasty through colonial times and into postcolonial reforms, this book presents a new and groundbreaking story about Korean womens legal struggles, revealing their surprising collaborative relationship with the colonial state.

Seven years of darkness
Chŏng, Yu-jŏng, 1966- author.
"A chilling psychological thriller about how far some will go to maintain control--and exact revenge. When a young girl is found dead in Seryong Lake, a reservoir in a remote South Korean village, the police immediately begin their investigation. At the same time, three men--Yongje, the girl's father, and two security guards at the nearby dam, each of whom has something to hide about the night of her death--find themselves in an elaborate game of cat and mouse as they race to uncover what happened to her, without revealing their own closely guarded secrets. After a final showdown at the dam results in a mass tragedy, one of the guards is convicted of murder and sent to prison. For seven years, his son, Sowon, lives in the shadow of his father's shocking and inexplicable crime; everywhere he goes, a seemingly concerted effort to reveal his identity as the reviled mass murderer's son follows him. When he receives a package that promises to reveal at last what really happened at Seryong Lake, Sowon must confront a present danger he never knew existed. Dark, disturbing, and full of twists and turns, Seven Years of Darkness is the riveting new novel from the internationally celebrated author of The Good Son"--

Skinship : stories
Choi, Yoon, author.
"A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims... Through the lives of an indelible array of individuals--musicians, housewives and pastors, children and grandparents, the men and women who own the dry cleaners and the mini-marts--Yoon Choi explores the Korean-American experience at its interstices: where first and second generations either clash or find common ground; where meaning falls in the cracks between languages; where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment; where displacement turns to heartbreak."--

Soft power of the Korean wave : Parasite, BTS and drama

At this fascinating historical moment, this timely collection explores the new meaning of the Korean Wave and the process of media production, representation, distribution and consumption in a global context as a distinctive and complex form of soft power. Focusing on the most recent phenomenon of Korean popular culture this book considers the Korean Wave in the global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity within the contexts of global inequalities and uneven power structures. The collection brings together internationally renowned scholars and regional specialists to examine this historically significant, visibly growing, yet under-explored current phenomenon in the global digital age. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, cultural studies, sociology, history and anthropology, and including a series of case studies from Asia, the USA, Europe and the Middle East, it provides an empirically rich and theoretically stimulating tour of this area of study, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Korean popular culture and in film, media, fandom and cultural industries more widely.

Tastes like war : a memoir
Cho, Grace M., author.
A powerful account of a Korean American daughter's exploration of food and family history to understand her mother's schizophrenia.

The Korean War and postmemory generation : contemporary Korean arts and films
Ko, Tong-yŏn, author.
This pioneering volume navigates cultural memory of the Korean War through the lens of contemporary arts and film in South Korea for the last two decades. Cultural memory of the Korean War has been a subject of persistent controversy in the forging of South Korean postwar national and ideological identity. Applying the theoretical notion of

The Routledge handbook of Korean as a second language

The Routledge Handbook of Korean as a Second Language aims to define the field, and to present latest research in Korean as a Second Language (KSL). It comprises a detailed overview of the field of KSL teaching and learning, discusses its development, and captures critical cutting-edge research within its major subfields. As the first handbook of KSL published in English, this book is of particular interest to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, language teachers, curriculum developers, and researchers in the fields of KSL and applied linguistics. While each chapter will be authored by internationally renowned scholars in its major subfields, the handbook also aims to maintain accessibility, so that it can also be of value to non-specialists.

The birth of Korean cool : how one nation is conquering the world through pop culture
Hong, Euny, author.
A Korean-born journalist describes the increasing popularity of South Korea's business, technology, education and pop culture exports around the world, discussing how a country that once banned miniskirts and rock and roll moved ahead into the 21st century. Original.

The hole : a novel
P'yŏn, Hye-yŏng, 1972- author.
Winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine. In this tense, gripping novel by a rising 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, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun's 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.

The morning news is exciting
Choi, Don Mee.
Poetry. Asian American Studies.

The power of the brush : epistolary practices in Chosŏn Korea
Cho, Hwisang, author.
"Focusing on the ways written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush examines the social effects of an "epistolary revolution" in sixteenth-century Korea and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women using vernacular Korean script, who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. The physical peculiarities of new letter forms such as spiral letters, the cooptation of letters for purposes other than communication, and the rise of diverse political epistolary genres combined to form a revolution in letter writing that challenged traditional values and institutions. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies"--

The shaman's wages : trading in ritual on Cheju Island
Yun, Kyoim, author.
"Most studies of Korean shamanism--a popular religion that is both celebrated and stigmatized--have minimized regional differences, focusing on shamans from central Korea whose work involves spirit possession. Less attention has been paid to hereditary shamans, a number of whom have resided for centuries on Cheju Island, off Korea's southwest coast. Although simbang (native Cheju shamans) are relied upon to perform important rituals, for which they receive lavish offerings, they are often perceived as charlatans who swindle innocent people. This first study of the material exchange and politics of Korean shamanism describes interactions between shamans and their clients in order to show how this ritual exchange is distinct from other forms of transaction, such as barter, purchase, bribery, and gift-giving. The "ritual economy" of Korean simbang involves not only monetary payment, but also reciprocity, sincerity, and the expressive forms that practitioners use to authenticate ritual actions that both emphasize ritual exchange and distinguish it from other forms social and economic transactions"--

The white book
Han, Kang, 1970- author.
Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize From Booker Prize-winner and literary phenomenon Han Kang, a lyrical and disquieting exploration of personal grief, written through the prism of the color white While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white--breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin--and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes. As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister's death, Han Kang's trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. THE WHITE BOOK--ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister--offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

Top-down democracy in South Korea
Mobrand, Erik Johan, 1981- author.
Although South Korea is widely heralded as a successful new democracy--buttressed by a politically engaged public--elections have done less than expected to force political parties to reorganize their elitist structures. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand demonstrates that political elites, contrary to theoretical expectations, have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization. Retelling South Korea's political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.

Untold night and day
Pae, Su-a, 1965- author.
'As cryptic and compelling as a fever dream... Bae Suah is one of the most unique and adroit literary voices working today' Sharlene Teo Finishing her last shift at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind, Kim Ayami heads into the night with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. The following day, she looks after a visiting poet, a man who is not as he seems. Unfolding over a night and a day in the sweltering summer heat, their world's order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disorientating ways. Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory feat of storytelling from one of the most radical voices in contemporary Korean literature. 'Highly original... Once I finished it, much of it slipped into my subconscious' Daily Telegraph

What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? : poems
Kim, Arlene.
This debut book of poems explores the experience of immigration, calling up images of the abandoned country known only through stories and memories and the universal feeling of homesickness shared by those embarking on lives in new places.

Your house will pay
Cha, Steph.
In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence. --

Youth for nation : culture and protest in Cold War South Korea
Kim, Charles R., 1974- author.
This in-depth exploration of culture, media, and protest follows South Korea's transition from the Korean War to the start of the political struggles and socioeconomic transformations of the Park Chung Hee era. Although the post-Korean War years are commonly remembered as a time of crisis and disarray, Charles Kim contends that they also created a formative and productive juncture in which South Koreans reworked pre-1945 constructions of national identity to meet the political and cultural needs of postcolonial nation-building. He explores how state ideologues and mainstream intellectuals expanded their efforts by elevating the nation's youth as the core protagonist of a newly independent Korea. By designating students and young men and women as the hope and exemplars of the new nation-state, the discursive stage was set for the remarkable outburst of the April Revolution in 1960. Kim's interpretation of this seminal event underscores student participants' recasting of anticolonial resistance memories into South Korea's postcolonial politics. This pivotal innovation enabled protestors to circumvent the state's official anticommunism and, in doing so, brought about the formation of a culture of protest that lay at the heart of the country's democracy movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. The positioning of women as subordinates in the nation-building enterprise is also shown to be a direct translation of postwar and Cold War exigencies into the sphere of culture; this cultural conservatism went on to shape the terrain of gender relations in subsequent decades. A meticulously researched cultural history, Youth for Nation illuminates the historical significance of the postwar period through a rigorous analysis of magazines, films, textbooks, archival documents, and personal testimonies. In addition to scholars and students of twentieth-century Korea, the book will be welcomed by those interested in Cold War cultures, social movements, and democratization in East Asia.

Zainichi Koreans and mental health : psychiatric problem in Japanese Korean minorities, their social background and life story
Kim, Taeyoung, author.
Using a qualitative, interview-based approach, Kim investigates how conflicting identities and social marginalization affect the mental health of members of the ethnic Korean minority living in Japan. So-called