Asia Literary Review / April 15, 2016

The Spring 2016 issue of the Asia Literary Review is a celebration of contemporary Korean literature from the country's most exciting young writers. It also includes an essay by Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. For a taste of what's in this issue, read part of Cheon Myeong-kwan's My Uncle Bruce Lee, where a group of village boys see the world through their obsession with Asia's Kung-fu hero. Follow that with an extract from Ae-ran Kim's The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child: teenage parents struggle to cope as their child's accelerated growth makes him an old man at the age they were when he was born. Source: http://www.asialiteraryreview.com/inside-issue-30

中国作家网 / May 11, 2016

崔宰勋，男，小说家，1973年出生于首尔，毕业于延世大学经营系和首尔艺术大学文艺创作系。2007年荣获第7届“文学与社会”新人文学奖，从此步入文坛。2010年出版第一部小说集《库勒巴尔男爵的城堡》，评论界称其“开启了2010年代崭新的小说时代”；2011年小说《七只猫眼》荣获“第44届韩国日报文学奖”，并被评为“韩国文化艺术委员会优秀文学图书”；2012年出版小说《蝴蝶梦》。崔宰勋的小说以奇崛的想象力和文本实验性著称。...   Source: http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/bk/2016-05-11/87704.html

keulmadang / January 12, 2014

Au début, six membres d'un club fermé sur Internet se retrouvent sur invitation de l'animateur du groupe. Dans une villa isolée, alors que la tempête fait rage, et que l'animateur invitant ne se montre pas, les six membres du club vont disparaître un à un...

K-Libre / June 03, 2014

Sept yeux de chats fascine. Les criminels sont ici écrivains et travestissent la réalité de leurs histoires et de leurs personnages. Mais n'est ce pas le propre du littérateur ? Si ce n'était ce revers de la médaille : les malfaiteurs du langage sont peut-être eux-mêmes issus d'altérations sous une troisième main créatrice. Pour en être sûr, par esprit de traduction ou écrit de contestation, il faudra poser la question au traducteur lui-même... Mais M à une petite amie, Artémis. Et un soir elle décide de lui raconter une histoire qu'elle arrêtera à l'aube et dont elle ne contera la suite que le nouveau soir venu. Gardant M en éveil et de nuits blanches en mille et une nuits, M écoutera. Dans l'intervalle, il travaille sur un nouveau roman : six personnes dans un chalet coincé par la neige. Cela le changera de la traduction du précédent roman, Sept yeux de chats... Artémis, dans la mythologie grecque, est la divinité des frontières, là où les limites sont incertaines, entre terre et mer. Tel ce récit révélé sous le sable, indistinct, dont les personnages irrésolus attendent un guide, un lecteur.

keulmadang / June 12, 2009

A la suite d’une vertigineuse urbanisation et d’une modernisation sans précédent, la Corée a montré deux visages radicalement différents. Le premier est celui d’un développement efficace et rayonnant, le second, celui d’une modernisation insensible et dangereuse. Au 21e siècle, quel regard portera la nouvelle génération d’écrivains coréens sur la ville ?

La Cause Littéraire / April 07, 2015

Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, on connaît. Grâce aux histoires originelles et à toutes les versions qu’elles ont pu engendrer, sur la page ou à l’écran, le détective et la créature sont devenus des monstres sacrés de la littérature occidentale, déclinés à toutes les sauces. Voici donc un livre qui s’inscrit dans cette perspective de réécriture. Mais Choi va bien au-delà du simple hommage ou de la relecture modernisée de mythes et d’histoires qui ont déjà fait couler beaucoup d’encre. Le Château du Baron de Quirval échappe à toute tentative de catégorisation : c’est un recueil de nouvelles qui se lit comme les notes compilées par un explorateur de l’inconscient, presque un roman policier dans sa manière de dérouler chaque récit en nous refusant toute conclusion hâtive, toute évidence trop commode. La première partie éponyme indique d’emblée que nous emprunterons des chemins de traverse dans notre exploration de l’imaginaire : c’est un collage de textes retraçant petit à petit l’histoire du Baron.

Brivemag / November 06, 2015

C’est une jeune maison d’édition entièrement consacrée à la littérature coréenne contemporaine qu’elle traduit avec une passion toute familiale. Decrescenzo éditeurs est présente pour la première fois à la Foire du livre de Brive avec deux de ses auteurs. Les livres ont une couverture au graphisme épuré, un papier au grammage plus épais et une fenêtre ouverte sur une diversité d’horizons. A découvrir stand L24 en cette année où la Corée du Sud est plus qu’à l’honneur. 

list_Books from Korea / -

Popular Culture Connects with Literature: Kim Young-ha, Park Min-gyu, Kim Kyung-uk, Kim Junghyuk   By Kang Yu-jung on Oct 31 2014 07:48:28 Vol.12 Summer 2011 Leaving behind the political of their predecessors, writers since the 1990s seek inspiration in the media-saturated, consumer-oriented masses of individuality.     1. Seek Within Popular Culture and Deliberate Through Literature Novels provide us with a multi-dimensional rendering of society’s cultural landscapes and desires. The language of the novel harnesses and gives form to desires drifting in reality; characters in novels and their conversations, sex, jobs, and lifestyles reflect the desires and deficiencies of their contemporaries. One great change that took place in Korean novels after 1987 was that personal desire was brought to the foreground. Contemporary novels began when the one-dimensional specimen of a fictional character evolved into an entity with individuality. Along those lines, it is notable that in Korean novels after 1987, a major part of personal desire is inspired by outside stimuli. One could argue that traditional novels such as Honggildongjeon are spawned by social circumstances of discriminating against second wives’ children, but the desire of novels after 1987 come in greater variety and class including objects represented by brand names. The desire of novels from 1990 and beyond preserves character types and their lifestyles. They turn on the computer the moment they wake up in the morning, listen to music on the Internet, and prefer the anonymity of 24-hour convenience stores. They are more comfortable around manmade structures than nature, and prefer the no-hassle relationships they form online than ones offline. The interesting thing is that a great part of this manmade world consists of a cultural form called popular culture. Their memories are shared with songs of popular singers, the names of fashionable clothing brands, and commercial film productions. Popular culture provides a well from which to draw one’s literary sensibility.

list_Books from Korea / -

The City: Modern Korean Literature Emerges from the City   By Park Sungchang on Nov 09 2014 23:26:59 Special Edition 2011 City life is one of the most universal experiences of modern people, which is not to say that this experience represents all facets of modernity, but it is true that it does encompass its most problematic aspects. The city is a product and process, not to mention the driving force of modernization. It is axiomatic that modern Korean literature not only delves into the problems of the city, but also raises issues with modernity. The foremost tasks for studying modernity in Korean modern literature are analyzing how cities are constructed in modern Korean literature, and how much of the urban sensibility is manifested. Korean modern literature had its birth in the city. If industrialization and capitalism can be construed to be some of the most apparent factors for the changes in modern Korean history, then the city is a cradle of political and economic problems as manifested through its living spaces. A critical aspect of modernity in Korean literature is that the city is a complex construct and yet people still live there. Korean modern literature reveals how its aesthetics were formulated in the city context, by people of the city. The city shows that modernity is not some abstraction, but something tangible with specific images and experiences. In Korean modern literature the problems of the city do not belong to a conceptual or ideological domain, but are something that can be experienced through incidents discovered in specific texts. 1.Risky Reading Kim Kyung-uk Munhakdongne Publishing Corp. 2008, 293p, ISBN 9788954606752 2. Ashes and Red Pyun Hye-Young, Changbi Publishers, Inc. 2010, 260p, ISBN 9788936433734 3. Gente di Wonmidong Yang Gui-ja, Cafoscarina, 2006 4. Style Baek Young Ok Wisdomhouse Publishing Co., Ltd. 2008, 355p, ISBN 9788959132959 5. Mujin im Nebel Kim Seungok, Peperkorn, 2009  

list_Books from Korea / -

The Man Who Loved Moebius: Novelist Choi Jae-hoon Author's Profile By Suh Heewon on Oct 20 2014 10:11:29 Vol.23 spring 2014 Truth and falsity, fiction and reality, stories inside stories, and stories outside stories all meet and are reconstructed in Choi Jae-hoon’s work. It is both “stranger than fiction” and a smorgasbord of “too strange to be false”-reality, storytelling, and imagination that goes beyond even the wildest fiction.                               Suh Heewon, “To sleep is to die, and to dream”   ∞ Prologue All types of love exist in the world. There are even people that are in love with shoes, stockings, corpses, and baseball bats. Love operates in mysterious ways, so it’s not surprising to meet a man in love with Moebius. Or more accurately, a man in love with the Moebius strip. Enthralled by the curious ribbon that is both many and one, one and many (try cutting the strip laterally), Choi Jae-hoon’s writing resembles the object of his love. That is to say, it is twisted.         Suh Heewon: You didn’t become a novelist right away. You majored in business administration, but went on to study creative writing after graduation, rather than work at a company. Then afterwards, you worked at your alma mater on the administrative staff. Fast forward a few years, you quit your job to devote more time to writing and then got your first book published a year later. How did you come back to literature from the brink of worldly success?          Choi Jae-hoon: I wasn’t very interested in fulfilling my own desires. I thought, isn’t it enough to let life take its natural course? I could’ve just been someone who liked reading, but my military service changed me. I became more realistic about what I wanted to do, so to speak. Living a highly controlled and disciplined lifestyle made me look back at my life and desires. When I went back to school, I started reading more than ever, mostly classics. I would make lists of books to read and kept my own notes on them.         Suh: There’s a saying in Korea, “One becomes a man when he goes to the army.” Going to the army is thought of as the first step to entering the real world. You’ve said that you first experienced society in the army and spent the time there reflecting on yourself. This must be the kind of perspective that differentiates an artist. As someone who got his start in art through voracious reading, what books made an impression on you in your youth?         Choi: Like most people, I was strictly a reader at first. I thought that writing was for people with a special gift. The book that first made me think that I too could write was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I think there’s a kind of trigger in that book that brings something out in the reader. I later learned that the book is a favorite among assassins. I thought that was a striking coincidence. You could say that that book assassinated my other self, the me that was living peacefully, and the person I am now survived to write books.