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Swinging That Emerald Light into Summer: New Releases from May and June 2025 scrap download

푸르른 그 빛을 휘둘러 여름으로, 5월과 6월의 신간 도서입니다.

「KLWAVE introduces international readers to various works of Korean literature. “New Releases” features titles that have been published in May and June 2025, selected from Kyobo Book Centre’s “Book of the Month” and Aladin’s “Magician’s Choice” lists.」

Clutching green in our hands, into summer
We swing that emerald light into summer

Like the lyrics of Korean indie rock band Jannabi’s song “Night Park,” summer has arrived. Here’s a collection of newly released Korean books from May and June that cast radiant reflections of summer and its traces. 
Facts without lies, perfect truths—sometimes they’re too small to hold a life. We need something more accepting, older, and looser. Something like a summer breeze settling on our shoulders before we even notice.

These are words from the author Kim Keum Hee in her “Words from the Author” in First Summer, Wanju, the debut entry in the “Listening Fiction” project from actor Park Jeong-min’s publisher Muze. At the heart of the story is Son Yeolmae, a voice actor who has lost her voice. In search of her colleague Sumi who vanished without paying her debt, Yeolmae arrives in a small town in Wanju. There, she works behind the counter at the small store run by Sumi’s mother and meets an array of the town’s residents.

Looking at the characters, each on their way to completing their race (“wanju” in Korean) whether in sorrow or crumbling, you’re reminded of singer IU’s words, “The book made me giggle again and again, but somehow there’s not a single scene that isn’t tinged with sadness.” First Summer, Wanju offers quiet comfort, that we, too, might complete our journey this summer, in a world drenched in dazzling green.
One of the most noteworthy, compelling voices of the young generation, Ko Sunkyung has released her first essay collection Drop by My Dreams Sometimes. It allows us to reflect on the cherished moments of our lives through everyday memories and feelings.

She weaves together stories of imperfect youth through the word “dreams”—dreams here being bedtime reveries but also hopes and expectations for the future. Ko’s language gives shape to the fluttering of the heart, clumsiness, wounds, and other feelings that we couldn’t articulate at the time and gently nudge awake the scenes nestled deep in our hearts. An invitation to the soft dream we would delightedly head into has finally arrived at our doorsteps.
Kim Bo-young, who breathed inspiration into Korean science fiction in the 2000s, returns with a collection of nine short stories exploring ecology, loss, recovery, technological civilization, and other modern issues. Set in unfamiliar realms, from outer space to deep sea, servers, and parallel worlds, her stories dissolve the boundaries between machines and living organisms, animals and humans with astonishing imagination. Furthermore, she depicts the possibility of restoration and regeneration as snow falling in the deep sea, or as coral and mushroom colonies persistently overtaking the land.

“Be it venom or pathogen, sadness or pain, it’s all the same here. It all becomes beautiful snowflakes. Becomes merciful sustenance and the gift of life” (translation by Sophie Bowman, Future Issue 9).
In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Korean Science Literature Award, publisher Hubble presents Cradling a Fragmented Universe, an anthology of short stories by five award-winning authors: Kim Choyeop, Cheon Seon-ran, Kim Hye-yoon , Cheong Ye, and Jo Seowol. This special collection of stories the authors wanted to write the most today astonishingly converge around one theme—beyond death, and love.

In a world shadowed by daily signs of collapse and death, Kim Choyeop tells the story of an invitation from a dead roommate becoming a token for a board game; Cheon Seon-ran writes about a zombie, a human, and a turtle on a journey to the sea after the end of the world. Emotions that remain even in the void left behind by a vanished presence; grief and the resolve for connection, held by those left behind. The writers in this anthology follow those warm and gentle traces in their own languages, telling stories about love that endures even beyond death. If you ask what science fiction can imagine and console, Cradling a Fragmented Universe may hold the answer.
The late poet Shin Kyeong-nim, who left an indelible mark in the history of Korean literature, sends his final message to the world in his posthumous poetry collection All That Lives Is Beautiful. The collection holds a total of 60 poems, including previously unpublished works.

Shin wrote poems to listen to the stories of “those too low to be heard,” to witness the dances of those “too small to be seen,” and to see the smiles of those “too blurred to be recognized” (from “In Search of a Star”). Through this poetry collection that urges us to fully embrace the present, as seen in the paradoxical line that “because it will soon vanish completely, it is all the more beautiful” (from “All That Lives Is Beautiful”), we are able to return to our own places in life. And in our places, we will stumble but keep walking, grieve but fall in love again.
Acclaimed writer and winner of major literary awards such as the Hankyoreh Literary Award and Young Writers Award, Kang Hwa-gil has released her new fiction Healing Light. At the height of “Korean feminist gothic storytelling,” Kang presents a long narrative that navigates an inescapable maze of memories, while meticulously designing intricate spaces of the female body, emotions, and communities.

The characters in her novel are trapped in social prisons, represented by family, school, religious communities, and smalltown life. Without holding back, Kang lays bare these confined spaces surrounding women and the dense emotions—like envy, jealousy, love and hate, and guilt. The clarity of truth glimpsed at the end of what seemed like endless pain, the “healing light,” shines through this story.
The portrait of a young poet who writes poetry amid life’s burdens and struggles unfolds in prose. Superbly Sad Self-Awareness is the first essay collection by Bak Chamsae, who received acclaim as winner of the 42nd Kim Su-yeong Literary Award.

Bak admits that she often feels pushed out of herself and the world. Yet those dissonant and sinking feelings ultimately fuel her drive to write. Even in moments on the brink of collapse, she props herself up with “trembling letters,” face discord head-on, and willingly embrace sorrow—these gestures linger in the reader’s heart for a long time. Telling us that you, too, may be someone who is sad for no reason, this book offers us empathy and gentle consolation.
Kim Ae-ran, who has long explored the meaning of “a single room” in Korean society, returns with a new short story collection titled I Said “Annyeong” after eight years. With a unifying theme of “space,” the seven short stories in the collection, set in the home as a stage, examine the fragile emotions that form around money such as economic divides, class tensions, and senses of deprivation and displacement.

“How difficult is it for one to try and put themselves in someone else’s shoes?” (from “House Party”) This collection features stories that unfold when characters visit other people’s homes, as well as characters who discover sharp differences as they cross thresholds. In a world where it is hard to step outside the boundary of “me” to become a part of “us,” Kim explores the possibility or the impossibility of us becoming “good neighbors” to each other.
Cha Jeongeun, who rose to fame with Tomato Cup Noodles, a collection of poems about summer as intense as the red color of tomatoes, returns with another collection about sparkling summer. Summer Peach Sparkling captures fleeting snapshots of youth in the heart of summer. From awkward love to easy losses, firm resolves and constant failures, loneliness that can’t be shared, and yearning to be together as friends, Cha whispers in crisp and fizzy language to endure this heavy, humid summer together. She invites readers to step into a single moment of summer seen through her eyes.

Leaning into the fan’s breeze,
Bearing the weight of midday

Without a word, we choose sodas at the convenience store and share the whole world. …
Romance, dense enough, even without the sea
The bones of summer, built by two.

― From “Bones of Summer”


Written by Seojeong Lee(Korean Literature Outreach Team)


Translated by Stella Haena Kim
Stella Kim is the recipient of the 2014 LTI Korea Award for Aspiring Translators and the 2016 Korea Times' Modern Korean Literature Translation Award, as well as multiple LTI translation grants and an Academy of Korean Studies grant. She has translated a number of short stories by authors including Gu Byeong-mo, Kang Hwa-Gil, Lee Kiho, Lee Jangwook, and Kim Seong Joong. Her book-length translations include Launch Something! by Bae Myung-hoon (2022, Honford Star) and Painter of the Wind by Lee Jung-myung (co-translated, 2023, Harriett Press). Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Asia Literary Review, and Korean Literature Now. She currently works as a freelance translator and interpreter while teaching translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

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