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Those Strange and Dazzling Days: New Releases from March and April 2026 scrap download

이상하고 눈부신 날들 : 3월과 4월의 신간 도서입니다.

#NewReleases #K-Literature #2026

There are some things in this world that pull us back no matter how hard we try to keep our distance. We get hurt, yet we reach out again. We fall apart day after day, and still somehow find our way through the next. Hearts break easily, relationships keep slipping out of sync, and the world often arrives wearing a face we cannot understand. Nevertheless, if there is still a reason for us to trust again, what might that reason be?

The works in this curation begin precisely from that question. They follow people who walk stubbornly toward life as they pass through loss and hatred, fear and loneliness, and inexplicable sorrow. These are stories of living hearts—strange and fragile, and all the more dazzling for it. And before long, you’ll come to see that every life, weighted as it is with absences and anxieties, converges on a single message: that even if we are imperfect, even if we cannot easily understand one another, we have to go on living without turning away from each other. Here, we offer you these tender acts of courage—trembling with the whole body and breaking apart, yet still trying to gather up their scattered pieces and somehow stitch themselves back together again.
Ye Soyeon, the youngest winner of the Yi Sang Literary Award to date, published a short story collection titled Your Bad Crowd. It opens onto a world where the fragility of people, each carrying their own deficiencies, becomes the most powerful medium for solidarity and unity. The seven stories in the collection gather contemporary readers together and whisper: there are relationships that resist our will, no matter how hard we try to keep our distance; and when we can’t quite bring ourselves to hate someone, we should hold them with all our might. Ye’s new work picks up the central theme of her previous collection Love and Flaws—pondering how to live alongside others—but takes it a step further: to wait patiently as we try to understand and bear with others’ awkward ways of being human. Her characters repeatedly run into sharp corners and shatter, only to be pieced back together, and they keep choosing to trust again. There is something rough-hewn about their stories—and that is what makes them so deeply moving.
Jeon Gunwoo, who wrote the 2008 short story “Light Sleep” and has since established himself as one of Korea’s foremost horror writers across horror, mystery, and thriller genres, returns with a new novel An Ill Tale. This occult mystery novel hinges on a chilling premise: unless you pass on the curse, an evil spirit will come for you. What sets it apart from other similar novels is the metafictional turn—the novel draws directly from events that the author claims to have experienced himself. The first-person narrator (Jeon Gunwoo) is a horror novelist who one day receives a strange email and begins to investigate an enigmatic death and a mysterious curse known as “hyungdam” (ill tale) together with his editor Cha Mijo. It features conventional elements of the horror genre, such as evil spirits, sorcery, and shamanism, but also weaves in taboos, urban legends, and tragedies of contemporary history. An Ill Tale reaches beyond mere fright, using its grounded tension to illuminate the deeper roots of human desire.
Yoon Hae-sung, who wrote the screenplay for the TV series The Dream Life of Mr. Kim, makes her fiction debut with the novel Can Hatred Be Cloned Too? As its provocative title suggests, this novel is a psychological mystery that sustains a taut tension while cutting sharply into the underside of everyday reality. One day, Suhan receives a package addressed to his dead wife and finds his own clone inside. As the duplicate quietly seeps into his life, fractures begin to spread through the relationships and emotions of the characters, and long-suppressed feelings of hatred begin to surface gradually. Yet the novel ultimately arrives at an unexpected message: love and hatred are often born from the same place, and feelings are tangled together beyond separation. The moment Suhan is forced to confront the self he has refused to see, readers come to understand the true meaning of the tragedy the story has been moving toward all along.
A History of Madwomen: Mothers and Daughters is a record of pain and loss written by the musician and writer Lang Lee. After her older sister’s death in 2021, Lee began gathering the fragments of words and thoughts her sister left behind in an effort to sustain a relationship that wasn’t yet over even in death, and at the same time, she began writing her own story. The book reflects on the suffering of Korean women passed down through generations and on the sorrow of these women who exist as someone’s mother and someone’s daughter. For Lee, this manuscript is both the cause and result of years she endured with sheer desperation. The words, packed down onto the page over four years, pour out a history of madness and death, but at their core lies a pure, eternal love. Carrying our childhood memories, we have somehow become adults, and yet we are here still, continuing to live through this thing called life.
To mark the centenary of writer Pak Kyongni, her posthumous poetry collection The Sorrow of Living has been published. Pak is best known as the author of Land, the monumental saga she completed over 26 years that left an indelible mark on Korean literary history, but she also wrote nearly 200 poems throughout her life. This new volume gathers forty-seven previously unpublished poems discovered in the archives of the Toji Cultural Foundation. For the untitled pieces, Pak’s grandson Kim Se-hi, chair of the foundation, has provided provisional titles inspired by his grandmother’s life and literary world. Particularly striking are handwritten manuscripts included in the collection, which preserve Pak’s distinctive regional dialect and colloquial style, allowing readers to experience the delicate, vivid rhythms of her poetry. As readers encounter the gaze of “Pak Kyongni the person” toward history and the times, as well as her intimate confessions as she looks back on her life, they will find themselves quietly honoring and cheering for her life.
Kim Choyeop has long pursued the possibility of the coexistence of humans and non-humans, and her second story collection, Jellyfish in Full Bloom, places beings that defy definition at the center of the page and completely turns upside down the way we have understood and imagined others. If The Bookstore of Planetary Languages opened up new sensory possibilities through encounters with unfamiliar worlds, this new collection takes things a step further to overturn the human-centered frameworks of perception and pose necessary questions. The strange beings in her works, with even stranger names like “Sand,” “Jellyfish,” “Sticky,” “Square,” and “Jelly,” are not defined by their functions or purposes, yet they nonetheless find their own ways to connect with the world—and therefore they carry in themselves the seed of new possibility. The moment we begin to question the legitimacy of “usefulness” as a measure, we become able, at last, to look and name once again those pushed to the margins.
Some say there is no paradise at the place you runaway to. But this novel says running away can sometimes help. First serialized on the reading platform Millie’s Library, where it gained an enthusiastic following, A Splendid Escape is a novel based on true stories, written by veteran K-pop producer Na Sangceon for every trainee in the world. The characters in his novel have chosen to run for their own reasons, and as they walk Camino de Santiago together in Spain, they learn to console one another. Across the 800-kilometer journey that unfolds in an unfamiliar country they fled to as their last resort, readers, alongside the characters, will be able to imagine a new starting point for their own lives. To every young person who was simply doing their best only to find themselves lost along the way, the book offers a warm blessing: buen camino—wishing you well on the road.
Before Baek Ohn-yu, who made her name with the novel Yuwon, published her first short story collection, one of the pieces in the collection was released early to readers. As attested by enthusiastic responses from the 750 early readers, The Generation of Promises showcases Baek’s singular gift for intricate narrative construction and bold plot lines. Trampling the reader’s expectations and predictions, Baek repeatedly overturns the direction of her stories through twist after twist. How many contradictions, truths, and lies can a single human being contain? This is precisely what makes the ironies of real life so dangerously thrilling. Following the seven short stories and novellas, readers will be able to peel back layer after layer of a single person, and in doing so they will find themselves looking at the world through somewhat changed eyes. Where exactly are we headed in this generation that seems to have lost hope? That fundamental question runs unmistakably through this collection.

Written by Eugene Ra

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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