LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Table of Contents
Bookshelf
From The Translator’s Desk
Cover Features
Cover Feature
Featured Writer
Bookmark
Reviews
LTI Korea Now
Introduction
In his famous essay “The Storyteller” (1936), Walter Benjamin argued that storytelling was a dying art. For him storytelling was tied to a way of life that was essentially coming to an end. Storytelling used to take place in an interpersonal “web” of relations in which the story functioned as a “gift” passed on orally from the storyteller to the listener. Stories told in this way would impart communal counsel and wisdom. In modernity, however, communities were no longer held together by oral stories representing communal life and experience. Indeed, after the shock of World War I, individuals were no longer able to make sense of and communicate their experience. The decline of storytelling, in this sense, was for Benjamin a symptom of the “productive forces of history.” Benjamin’s contrast between an older culture of oral storytelling and a modern print culture centered on private reading and information circulation generates the following questions: What happens to storytelling with the development of mass-printed literature? If, as Benjamin says, oral storytelling is no longer the prime narrative form for our historical moment, why are some Korean writers drawing their inspiration from folktales and other kinds of oral stories? For this summer issue, we invited Bora Chung and Kang Sungeun to comment on the stories they tell. As you will see, Chung and Kang draw on both Korean and non-Korean storytelling traditions, and suggest different ways in which storytelling continues to inform and enrich literary practice today. This summer, our featured writer is the poet An Heeyeon, who is best known for her lyrical poems that build on powerful images and enigmatic narrative turns. The eponymous poem in Walking the Carrot Field (2024), for instance, features a lyric speaker who encounters “a mole’s eyes” while standing on a “Carrot patch unfurling / under moonlight.” In the last two lines of the poem, the speaker describes the carrot field as “A long story only beginning / as a short one draws to an end.” We invite you to read ten poems specially selected by An Heeyeon for publication in this issue and to think about the stories embedded in them—stories featuring, in critic Song Hyungji’s words, acts of gift-giving and “meticulous care,” “rescue,” and “hope.” These are not stories of the kind Benjamin was discussing, yet they are in their own ways stories about finding counsel and community in the twenty-first century.In every issue of KLN, we try to bring you diverse voices from around the world. In this issue, we have an exceptional lineup of international writers joining us. We are pleased to share an essay on untranslatability by Deepa Bhasthi, who won the 2025 International Booker Prize with her translation of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, a compelling collection of stories about Muslim girls and women in southern India. Hong Kong Canadian writer Sheung-King has given us a moving Bookshelf essay about masculinity and silence. In our Featured Review, acclaimed science fiction writer Sarah Pinsker discusses Anton Hur’s translation of Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, which was just released this past April, and tells us why short stories are in many ways better than novels.I would like to thank our special contributors, as well as all the other writers, reviewers, and translators who are helping us keep up to speed with all that is happening in the literary world, both within Korea and without. Lastly, I’d like to thank Joey Yu for giving us illustrations that invoke all the pleasures and wonders of storytelling. As Kang Sungeun puts it, stories “slow down time.” Have a wonderful, slow summer.
Editor-in-Chief
