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Korean Literature Now

Vol. 69 Fall 2025 scrap download

Vol. 69 Fall 2025 이미지

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Table of Contents

Bookshelf

From The Translator’s Desk

Cover Feature

Featured Writer

Bookmark

Reviews

Bookcart

LTI Korea Now

Introduction

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea started publishing Korean Literature Now in the fall of 2016. It replaced a quarterly magazine called _list, which ran from fall 2008 to spring 2016. I was an avid reader of both publications. Having returned to Seoul after living many years abroad, I was hungry for information about Korean literature. These magazines informed me about what was happening in the Korean literary sphere: what was being published, who was translating whom, and what critics were talking about. I used the magazines to make decisions at bookstores. Some covers were so gorgeous I could not let them go. I hoarded copies, intending to frame them. In time, I started contributing translations and occasionally joined the editorial board. So when I was asked a few months ago to take on the position of editor-in-chief of Korean Literature Now, needless to say, I was more than happy to accept.


I am grateful to LTI Korea for fully supporting new ideas and initiatives for the magazine. We have been lucky to work with a new design and publishing team. We have expanded our editorial board and instituted a new advisory board. In addition, we have introduced several new sections: Bookshelf, From the Translator’s Desk, Featured Review, Bookcart, and LTI Korea Now. In this issue, we proudly share contributions from US-based film director Gina Kim, prizewinning translator and advisory board member Anton Hur, and Professor Susan Bernofsky from Columbia University. The cover feature showcases carers and caregiving in contemporary Korea. Critic Shin Soojeong discusses three works of fiction that engage with the ethics of care, and poet Seo Hyoin shares his experience of caring for a daughter with Down syndrome. Our featured writer is Hwang Jungeun, whose novels are widely available in English: One Hundred Shadows, dd’s Umbrella, and Years and Years, to name a few. If you haven’t already read her books, I hope you will discover one of Korea’s most challenging novelists working today. In Bookmark, we introduce recent works by novelists Seo Jangwon and Haena Sung, as well as poets Park Joon and Moon Boyoung. In LTI Korea Now, Sarah K. H. Yoo reports on the dialogue that recently took place between Kim Hyesoon and Jeffrey Yang at the July 2025 LTI Korea Global Literature Forum.


I hope the essays, reviews, and translations featured in this issue will enlarge our readers’ sense of how Korean literature is engaging with the contemporary world. As Gina Kim reminds us, especially after COVID-19 all of us live with an awareness of our fragility and interconnection, as well as a shared sense of standing dangerously “at the edge of collapse.” We live our daily lives with an acute sense of the dangers of environmental disaster and the terrible costs of political violence. We worry about the breakdown of traditional social structures, the precarity of labor, and the limits of care. If, like the protagonists of Hwang Jungeun’s “A Day, Without Trouble,” we find ourselves trapped in a dark tunnel, facing a car that has broken down, will we risk our lives to help others? With this striking image of our interconnected fate, Hwang suggests that our ability to care for others will always be dependent on others also caring for us.


Your comments and responses matter to us. Contact us at koreanlitnow@klti.or.kr for suggestions and inquiries. I would like to remind you that the contents of our magazine, both past and present, are freely available online at kln.or.kr. Please share this magazine with friends and help us reach a larger audience. I look forward to meeting you again in the winter.


Eun Kyung Min

Editor-in-Chief