Award-winning Korean author Hye-young Pyun, a writer who excels at creating and controlling her tragic heroes like a puppet master does a marionette, is my favourite Korean author in translation. Her works The Hole and City of Ash and Red are masterpieces of genre fiction which both carved out new niches within the psychological horror …
The folktales of Japan stand amongst the mythologies of Greece and Iceland as some of the most unusual, nightmarish, thrilling, and exciting stories the ancient world has to offer. Japanese yokai (ghosts and monsters) like the kappa, kitsune, and tanuki are sources of endless fascination, hilarity, and strangeness. They also offer the potential inspiration for …
Body swap stories are a dime a dozen, from Freaky Friday to Your Name. But how about a story of three girls who discover the power to turn into boys for a short time? Girls Lost is the tale of three teenagers, exhausted and confused by the system that divides boys and girls and the …
Approaching a book like Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is an enormous undertaking; something that should be done with real consideration. The novel has sold over a million copies in its native South Korea, has been adapted into a successful Korean film, and has been a huge spark for the fires of the #metoo movement in …
There is so much mischief, corruption, deception, and aggression spilling out from Hurricane Season that the book’s bindings can hardly contain it. Hurricane Season is a courageous story, and Fernanda Melchor is undoubtedly a courageous author for committing it to paper. It’s a book about the myriad evils that stain the human spirit. It’s a …
In 2018, Intan Paramaditha and Stephen J. Epstein brought a literary gift to the English-speaking world. Apple and Knife was an intensely smart, sharp, scathing, witty, and innovative collection of short stories that reframed folk and fairy tales from the world over; digging up old tales and making them relevant to the modern world, moulded …
Coming-of-age novels, and stories of self-discovery, can take a variety of forms across myriad genres of fiction, but most are typically grounded in realism, following the rules of their world. b, Book, and Me is a story of a different sort, leaning on a fever dream surrealism that grows in intensity over time, and using …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a work of literature does not have to be enjoyable to be considered good. Books are written and read for an infinite number of reasons, and with the case of dystopian literature it is often written as a warning of things to come, or things that are already …
Bae Suah is one of the great contemporary authors of South Korea. Author of A Greater Music, Nowhere to Be Found, and North Station (a personal favourite), she has burst onto the stage that is 2020 with a topsy-turvy surrealist tale that feels uncomfortably in-line with the narrative of the 21st Century. Untold Night and …
In so many ways, the women of East Asian literature are the prominent voices of their cultures today. In Japan and Korea especially, those writers who have the greatest clarity of mind and creative spirits are insightful, fascinating, and imaginative women. Women who speak for the sidelined and the unrepresented, women who show us our …
