KIM Soom’s unique literary world can be describes as grotesque. Bedis full of painful images set in a grotesque world devoid of alternate possibilities. These dark, grotesque images are summoned as the only means of dealing with the grotesque world and the cruel realities in it. The stories are deeply perceptive of life but devoid of emotions, a trait that is uniquely KIM Soom. Like a dry branch that goes up in flames with the slightest spark, KIM Soom’s dry narrative holds a great incendiary power, making the unfamiliar characters, events, and times attractive. The book contains the following stories: “Breast of 409”, the story of an old couple who sit at their dining table waiting for the apartment manager in an apartment building that is about to be torn down; “Bed”, the story of an old woman who was confined to her bed for twenty years by “them” “Visitors”, the story of a person who’s afraid her house will be torn down any minute and the visitors who offer to protect her; “Park’s Desk”, the story of a man who guards his desk despite the company’s insistence that he resign; “The Second Drawer”, the story of a woman who obsesses over a locked drawer in the house; and “Rice and Salt”, the story of a day in the life of an old woman who meets her dead sisters and slowly dies.

Kim Soom began her literary career by winning the Daejeon Ilbo Spring New Writers Contest in 1997. She is the author of the short story collections Would I Be Able to Touch Trees, Noodles, Your God, and the novels Sewing Women, One Person, Have You Ever Wished A Soldier to Become An Angel, The Drifting Land, The Listening Period, A Swallow Heart, and others. She has won the 2012 Heo Gyun Literary Award, the 2013 Contemporary Literature Award, the 2013 Daesan Literary Award, the 2015 Yi Sang Literary Award, the 2017 Dongni Literary Award, the 2020 Kim Hyun Literary Prize, and the 2020 Dong-in Literary Award.