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English(English) Article

Sorry Not Sorry

About the Article

Title another name
Reading Dalkey Archive Press’s Library of Korean Literature
Article
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/sorry-not-sorry
Journal
The New Yorker
Issued Date
October 19, 2015
Page
-
Language
English(English)
Country
UNITED STATES
City
-
Book
Please Look After Mom , I have the right to destroy myself
Writer
Shin Kyung-sook , Hwang Sok-yong , Yi Mun-yol , Kim Young-ha
Translator
Tanti Lesmana,Chi-Young Kim

About the Author

  • Kyung-Sook Shin
  • Birth : 1963 ~ -
  • Occupation : Novelist
  • First Name : Kyung-sook
  • Family Name : Shin
  • Korean Name : 신경숙
  • ISNI : 000000008374681X
  • Works : 136
Descriptions - 1 Languages
  • English(English)

For American readers, literary evocations of Korea have come, for the most part, in the form of dystopian novels written by people without any direct connection to the country. Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” is set in the harsh confines of North Korea; at the other extreme, David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” features a futuristic South Korea-inspired “corpocracy,” a hotbed of clones, plastic surgery (“facescaping”), and insurrection. With few exceptions, novels by actual Koreans have not registered here. Kyung-sook Shin’s “Please Look After Mom” briefly appeared on the Times best-seller list in 2011. (She made headlines this year amid charges that she once plagiarized passages from a Yukio Mishima story, for which—yes—she later apologized.) Kim Young-ha’s “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” (2007) and Hwang Sok-yong’s “The Old Garden” (2009) both received a trickle of reviews, and Yi Mun-yol’s story “An Anonymous Island” appeared in these pages in 2011. That’s about it. Happily, Dalkey Archive’s series, launched in 2013, in collaboration with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, provides a panoramic view of Korean fiction, in all its strangeness and variety, from the nineteen-thirties to the present.

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