Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung s stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or negativity. Instead, we find a world in which the bizarre and terrifying are often put to comic use, even in direst of situations, and point toward a sort of redemption to be found precisely in the weirdest and most unsettling...
Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea ...
Kim Joo-Young Louis Vinciguerra Inrae You Vinciguerra
Hailed by critics, "Stingray" has been described by its author as "a critical biography of my loving mother." With his father having abandoned his family for another woman, Se-young and his mother are forced to subsist on their own in the harsh environment of a small Korean farming village in the 1950s. Determined to wait for her husband's return, Se-young's mother hangs a dried stingray on the kitchen doorjamb; to her, it's a reminder of the fact that she still has a husband, and that she must behave as a married woman would, despite all. Also, she claims, when the family is reunited, the...
Hailed by critics, "Stingray" has been described by its author as "a critical biography of my loving mother." With his father having abandoned his ...