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Stories You’ll Always Come Back To: New Releases from November and December 2025 scrap download

끝내 선택하게 되는 이야기들, 11월과 12월의 신간 도서입니다.

#NewReleases #K-Literature #2025

As the days grow shorter and the year draws to a close, we find ourselves pausing more often—asking where we are and what we’ve held onto along the way. At moments like these, a book feels less like comfort and more like a fixed point. It doesn’t need to explain anything or offer answers. It simply needs to be the kind of story you want to keep close.

 

KLWAVE presents a selection of Korean titles published in November and December 2025 that readers have been lingering over. Moving across fiction,essays, and poetry, these books offer a sense of the sensibilities and questions shaping Korean literature right now.

An Ordinary Existence is an essay collection that has long held a place on Korean readers’ shelves. Lee Seok-won's prose—calm and composed as it moves through love, relationships, loneliness, and anxiety—captures the density of the unremarkable. This new edition adds a layer of commentary by comedian and writer Moon Sang-hoon, inviting a different generation to read a familiar text through fresh eyes. As his perspective interacts with sentences readers may already know, the word “ordinary” opens up once again, asking what it means to us now.

Cheon Seonran is a writer who brings human questions into the heart of scientific imagination. This linked story collection unfolds against the extreme backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, yet people remain its true subject. The book does not simply ask how we survive—it asks what it means to not give up on one another even in disaster, and what it means to keep living together. Within the tension of genre fiction, it invites us to reconsider care and connection.

Mun Yu-sok, a former judge turned writer, has long explored the point where social institutions and individual lives meet. The Decision to Be Myself is an essay collection that asks what it means to remain one self amid the many roles and expectations we’re asked to inhabit. Rather than offering advice, it draws readers toward their own questions, conveying in measured prose how much effort it takes to hold onto one's own standards in a rapidly changing world.

In an age when the word “love” is so easily consumed, can poetry still capture something true about human feeling? Well, There’s Love Too, and Other Distinctly Human Qualities poses that question as Korea’s first SF poetry anthology. Contemporary poets—including Kim Hyesoon and Shin Hae-uk—combine scientific imagination with poetic language, using the future as a space for experimentation. Familiar subjects like love, the body, sensation,and language take on new resonance in unfamiliar settings. In doing so, the anthology reflects how far Korean contemporary poetry continues to expand its own boundaries.

Kim Sang Hyun is an essayist who draws on everyday experiences to write about growth. The World I Gained by Wandering argues that even time spent feeling lost was time spent expanding one's world. It places meaning in the process rather than the outcome. This collection offers time in place of impatience.

A new novel from Hwang Sok-yong, one of the defining voices of modern Korean literature, Grandma follows the life of Grandma, whose story reflects the ups and downs of modern Korean history. Stories of family, labor, memory,and loss extend beyond one person’s life to become the story of an era. Through an individual voice, the novel restores a sense of collective time.

This collection gathers prose and previously unpublished letters by Pi Chundeuk, a central figure in the Korean essay tradition. His restrained sentences and sensitivity to silence remain as affecting as ever. Quiet reflections on parting, relationships, and the traces time leave behind stand in contrast to the swift pace of contemporary language. It is a book to keep close—one to read slowly and return to often.

This is the winter installment of a series that introduces short and mid-length fiction by contemporary writers each season. Three authors, each with a distinct sensibility, capture the fractures in everyday reality and the tensions beneath its surface. In their calm but clear stories, fiction affirms that it remains a valid language for interpreting the present.


Written by Yoo Jaejoon (Division of Exchange and Promotion)


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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