It’s a bull market for fictional hit men. Among recent assassin-centric thrillers is Malcolm Mackay’s brilliant Glasgow Trilogy: “The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter,” “How a Gunman Says Goodbye” and “The Sudden Arrival of Violence,” plus a couple of stand-alones by the same author. Now comes...

“The Incendiaries” is a sharp little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye. You keep blinking at these pages, struggling to bring the story into some comforting focus, convinced you can look past its unsettling intimations. But R.O. Kwon, the 35-year-old Korean American author, doesn’t...

about North and South Korea have dominated the news recently, but what do Americans really know about the history of these countries? There may be some gaps in our collective knowledge, but a trio of novels steps into that void, beautifully illuminating Korea’s past in ways that inform our present.