Korean Literature

One morning in December, Kyungha is called to her friend Inseon’s hospital bedside. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation following a wood-chopping accident, Inseon is bedridden and begs Kyungha to take the first plane to her home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird, who will quickly die unless it receives food. Unfortunately, as Kyungha arrives a snowstorm hits. Lost in a world of snow, she begins to wonder if she will arrive in time to save the bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.

Korean immigrant Mina Pak Johnson is clearing out the last of her husband’s things when she finds a picnic basket in his closet—a long-forgotten wedding present from her mother. With it comes decades of memories—of her mother’s wishes for her to be happy and her own shattered hopes for her first child—and regret at never having used it. Pushing her husband’s ashes and a bottle of wine in a rusty old stroller, Mina is determined to re-create the picnic they never had. But with it comes something Mina never expected, illuminating a loving gesture her husband made years ago.

When her friends gift her a 23-and-Me test as a gag, high school senior Chloe Kang doesn’t think much of trying it out. She doesn’t believe anything will come of it—she’s an only child, her mother is an orphan, and her father died in Seoul before she was even born, and before her mother moved to Oklahoma. It’s been just Chloe and her mom her whole life. But the DNA test reveals something Chloe never expected— she’s got a whole extended family from her father’s side half a world away in Korea.

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.

In this compelling and beautifully-patterned novel, Han Kang tells the interwoven stories of a Greek instructor who is losing his sight and a woman who refuses to speak. Uniquely involving, and thoughtful, it explores the depths and limits of human connection.

Chobahm's perfect life in Snowglobe came crashing down when she discovered the truth about Haeri. The girl she watched faithfully on television was far from perfect. And the TV family revered by millions was nothing more than an illusion created by the sinister Director Cha. But revealing the lies was only the first crack in the domed utopia.

Heungbo and Nolbo are not only brothers, but also friends—until their father passes away. Overcome by greed, Nolbo turns Heungbo away and refuses to help him when Heungbo loses his crops. Can Heungbo forgive Nolbo? Will they learn to be a family again?

Early one morning, 26-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell and a phone call from his brother asking if everything's all right at home - he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can't remember much about the night before; having suffered from seizures for most of his life, Yu-jin often has trouble with his memory.

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.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard, on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family. The Hive and the Honey is a “virtuosic” (Vanity Fair) collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters.

Riley Oh can't wait to see her sister get initiated into the Gom clan, a powerful lineage of Korean healing witches their family has belonged to for generations. Her sister, Hattie, will earn her Gi bracelet and finally be able to cast spells without adult supervision. Although Riley is desperate to follow in her sister's footsteps when she herself turns 13, she's a saram - a person without magic. Riley was adopted, and despite having memorized every healing spell she's ever heard, she often feels like the odd one out in her family and the gifted community.

In a world where Saints are monsters and Wonderland is the dark forest where they lurk, it’s been five years since young witches and lovers Caro Rabbit and Iccadora Alice Sickle were both sentenced to that forest for a crime they didn’t commit—and four years since they shattered one another’s hearts, each willing to sacrifice the other for a chance at freedom. Now, Caro is a successful royal Saint-harvester, living the high life in the glittering capital and pretending not to know of the twisted monster experiments that her beloved Red Queen hides deep in the bowels of the palace.

Winter Park and Bobby Bae are Korean American high school juniors whose families have been friends since the kids were making crayon art. They, however, are repulsed by each other. Winter is MIT-bound, comfortable keeping people at arm’s length. Bobby is as Type-A, anxious, and risk-averse as you can get. He’s also been recently dumped. That’s why, when Winter’s and Bobby’s parents insist that they go on a northeast college campus tour together, both teens find reasons to accept even though the idea of being stuck in a car together for 700 miles sounds unbearable.

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boy band, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic.

It's been a year since Penny first walked through the doors of the Dallergut Dream Department Store, and surviving a year at the store means one thing… She is now an official employee of the dream industry! She can finally take the express commuter train to the Company District, where all the dream-production companies are located, and discover how all raw dream materials and testing equipment are produced. But the Company District is not quite what she expected. Instead it hides a secret underbelly of the magical industry that Penny thought she was a part of.

When the Seoul police inform Min that his girlfriend Yu-jin has committed suicide, he’s sure it can't be true. She was successful, ambitious, happy, just on the cusp of graduating from university and claiming the future she’d always dreamed of.

After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien finds themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth’s gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food? As they discover, humans are delicious. Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shifts their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit a prey’s sexual preference, then attacks at the pivotal moment of their encounter.

Snow Hunters traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life on the coast of Brazil. Throughout his years there, four people slip in and out of his life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must let go of his traumatic past.

From master storyteller An Na comes the Printz Award-winning novel about a Korean girl who tells her firsthand account of trying to find her place and identity in America from the day she leaves Korea as a child to her rocky journey through the teenage years.

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.