In a recent issue of n+1 , contributor Nausicaa Renner formally renounced reading essays about coronavirus. Until quarantine ends, she wrote , "I vow to only read fiction. For me, the well of individual experience has run dry." For me, though, reading fiction is no guarantee of release from my...

The novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , illustrates the struggle of an ordinary Korean woman, Jiyoung, to prove her worth in a surrounding that insists on putting a feather in men’s cap, even when they do not deserve it. She is a reflection of all those women who leave their jobs and careers because of...

In Korean writer Ha Seong-nan’s most recently translated work, apparently ordinary characters and situations surreptitiously slip off-kilter. These stories act as acute reminders of how our supposedly normal lives can quickly become much stranger. Take “On That Green, Green Grass”, for example: a...

Disasters, accidents, and deaths abound in Bluebeard’s First Wife. A woman spends a night with her fiancé and his friends, and overhears a terrible secret that has bound them together since high...