Korean Literature

This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild - and to hatch an egg of her own. An anthem for individuality and motherhood, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has captivated millions of fans in Korea, where it is a contemporary classic. Now the novel is making its way around the world.

On its surface, life in Houston in the 1950s is as you'd expect: stoic fathers, restless teens, drive-in movies, and souped-up Cadillacs. But underneath lies a world shifting under high school junior Aaron Broussard's feet. There's a class war between the "haves" and the "have-nots" as well as a real war, Korea, happening on the other side of the world. It is against this backdrop that Aaron comes of age, trying to understand how first loves, friendship, violence, and power can alter what "traditional America" means for the people trying to find their way in a changing world.

Much like Lee Chang-dong’s internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally published in Korea in the 1980s and now translated into English for the first time, investigate themes of injustice, betrayal, and terror—on both an intimate and national scale. Lee writes deeply and hauntingly about conflicts between family, the powerful and the vulnerable, conformists and rebels.

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States is an exciting piece of "speculative fiction." The novel posits that there was a nuclear attack against the US on March 21, 2020 by North Korea, and that a national bipartisan commission was created to investigate what and how it happened. It's pretty scary stuff.

Emma Yoon dreams of opening her very own culinary school in Los Angeles. She’s saving up for it by teaching young ladies the art of Korean royal court cuisine, a prerequisite to marrying into the exclusive upper crust Korean families. Thanks to her godmother, a renowned Korean matchmaker, business is booming, and Emma doesn’t have the time, nor the desire, to settle down herself. But when rival matchmakers come after her godmother by taking issue with Emma’s single status, her godmother’s reputation and Emma’s dreams face potential ruin.

Jin and Suja meet and fall in love while studying at university in Pyongyang. She is a young journalist from a prominent family, while he is from a small village of little means. Outside the school, North Korea has fallen under great political upheaval, plunged into chaos and famine. When Jin returns home to find his family starving, their food rations all but gone, he makes a rash decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

When Elijah Ri arrives in New York City for an internship at his father’s massive tech company, Haneul Corporation, he expects the royal treatment that comes with being the future CEO—even if that’s the last thing he wants. But instead, he finds himself shuffled into a group of overworked, unpaid interns, all sharing a shoebox apartment for the summer.

In an Empire run on necromancy, dead sorcerers are the lifeblood. Their corpses are wrapped in chains and drained of magic to feed the unquenchable hunger for imperial conquest. Born with magic, Arienne has become resigned to her dark fate. But when the voice of a long-dead sorcerer begins to speak inside her head, she listens. There may be another future for her, if she’s willing to fight for it. Miles away, beneath a volcano, a seven-eyed dragon also wears the Empire’s chains. Before the imperial fist closed around their lands, it was the people’s sacred guardian.

Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Danny is a Chinese American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when each of them travels to the region where China borders North Korea.

Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners has been written especially for students from low-intermediate to intermediate level, designed to give a sense of achievement, a feeling of progress and most importantly - enjoyment! Mapped to B1-B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference, these eight captivating stories are designed to give you a sense of achievement and a feeling of progress when listening.

In a race to stop an ancient evil from destroying the worlds as they know them, Sunny comes to a startling, heartbreaking realization: if she chooses love—everything will burn. Sunny Cho aspires to be the dullest, least interesting person in any given room, which can be challenging for a nine-tailed fox spirit. So she drifts from city to city—staying clear of any and all attachment—and keeps her fox buried deep inside her. It is better this way. She would rather live as half of herself than risk losing control of her terrible powers.

A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town ... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years ... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims. Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground,

Often considered the highest achievement in Korean fiction, The Nine Cloud Dream poses the question: Will the life we dream of truly make us happy? Written in 17th-century Korea, this classic novel's wondrous story begins when a young monk living on a sacred Lotus Peak in China succumbs to the temptation of eight fairy maidens. For doubting his master's Buddhist teachings, the monk is forced to endure a strange punishment: reincarnation as the most ideal of men.

A greedy tiger roamed the forest looking for food. One day he came upon a rabbit. But the rabbit conitnued to outsmart the tiger and not get eaten. "Rabbits are dangerous," thought the tiger. "I must warn everyone about them."

Sori has worked her whole life to become a K-pop idol, until she realizes she doesn’t want a life forever in the spotlight. But that’s not actually up to Sori—she’s caught between her exacting mother’s entertainment company and her father’s presidential aspirations. And as the pressure to keep her flawless public image grows, the last person she should be thinking about is her ex-boyfriend.

Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she's put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she's run from all her life. But it isn't long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last. Years ago, Elsa's now-catatonic mother had warned her that the women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But beyond these ghosts, Elsa also faces a more earthly fate.

Four days before Christmas, eight-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, twenty-eight-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and forty-eight-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself.

A beautifully crafted, enriching saga inspired by East Asian mythology, The Melancholy of Untold History is Minsoo Kang’s debut novel, steeped in history like R.F. Kuang’s Babel, epic in scope like Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, and lyrically exciting like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, interweaving four complex yet entertaining stories as they shape and create a nation’s literary narrative through the themes of love and grief.

Meet Noh Inji: thirty years old, five wedding rings and counting, and she’s never once been in love. When Inji takes a job at Wedding & Life, the popular matchmaking service, she never imagines her role will be with NM, their secretive marriage division that rents out “field spouses” for a fixed period to their elite clientele. Just like a real marriage, Inji’s assignments involve a wedding, some sex, and a spot of housework. It’s all tailored exactly to the client’s desires—no legal battles, no fights, no emotional baggage.

1999: At the end of the millennium, the Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children than ever before. One evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of an unhoused stranger in the backyard with a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever. 1977: Newly married, Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her hardworking and often-absent husband.