LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
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Reviews
[ENGLISH] If Anyone Could Kill
Mrs. Shim Is a Killer Kang Jiyoung’s Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, translated by Paige Morris, follows Shim Eunok, an unassuming middle-aged ajumma who becomes a contract killer for the Smile Detective Agency to save her family from debt. The story operates in a lawless underworld befitting a crime novel, populated by desperate inhabitants driven beyond the edges of respectable society. Yet Kang renders this underworld not through grim realism, but an offbeat, farcical, and fast-moving narrative style whose violence is as comic as it is disturbing. Mrs. Shim enters with her handwritten resume, oblivious to the true nature of the position she is applying for. Wielding a chef’s knife, she saws into the air as though slicing a “well-aged rack of beef,” successfully completing the job interview by drawing on the expertise she acquired as a local supermarket butcher. Park Taesang, the Agency boss, is transfixed. He, too, learned to handle knives from his father who ran a sashimi restaurant by the sea. Such whimsical details lend the novel a certain animal sensibility, collapsing the presumed distance between the everyday and exceptional violence. In a chapter entitled “The Killer,” a chopstick assassin also works as a chicken sexer, taking pleasure in being a “cold-blooded arbiter” of the chicks’ fates. This visceral authority affords the assassin a minor victory in a society that otherwise seeks to obscure the little power she holds, and her pleasure resembles the apprehensive thrill Mrs. Shim experiences upon carrying out her first kill. These animal instances move beyond primitive bloodlust, gesturing to something more fundamental: the human desire to matter, to be seen, remains inseparable from the exhilarating experience of transgression. The book’s characters are hardly virtuous; fraudsters, mercenaries, and manipulators continually devise schemes for making quick money. Human desire, however, is never innocent; as the characters’ complex and compromising histories gradually come into view, Kang allows them to dwell at the edges of familiar moral taxonomies, unsettling the age-old fiction of good and evil, of villain and victim. This approach is reinforced by the novel’s episodic structure. Each chapter is titled after a different narrator—“The Shaman,” “The Secret Agent,” or “The Confidant”—as though mimicking modern society’s tendency to quantify a life into its social function. Each story, however, unveils the past behind that role, undoing the ostensible certainty of identity. Mr. Park once cherished the modest dream of becoming a CEO who also writes poems, but a disastrous romance with the sashimi restaurant’s daughter draws him into the murder-for-hire business. His star apprentice, Joongi, comes to Seoul not for a job, but in search of his emotionally distant mother. As the characters come into being with every chapter, relationships accumulate, converge, and become entangled through an undoing—an undoing into the past that humanizes these unruly people who had to sin to survive. The novel’s enmeshed lives evoke the wave of Korean crime-noir films of the early 2000s, which popularized tropes of gangster romance, tragic twists, and sentimental criminals. Kang, however, places the disarming ajumma at the center of this masculine genre. When she isn’t out to kill, Mrs. Shim is a caring mother and a friendly neighbor who brings banchan to an elderly woman with dementia. While her prescriptive identity becomes her greatest camouflage, the anonymity of her double life does not last. As the plot develops, the rival Happy Detective Agency begins investigating the mysterious new killer, and the ensuing turf war soon places Mrs. Shim’s children in danger. The novel’s escalating conflict establishes the propulsive momentum of a crime thriller, while its shifting narrators reveal how a web of scattered personal histories—misplaced love, a fateful guess, or sheer bad luck—converge to form an entire universe. With its rousing imagination and adrenaline-fueled rhythm, Mrs. Shim Is a Killer overturns the familiar claim that life is a sum of the choices we make. Choice is no self-contained act, but a strange amalgam of unforeseen events, serendipitous encounters, and unreasoned forces that intrude upon a life from beyond the limits of intention. Kang embraces a profusion of narrative: those bizarre, obscene, and endlessly diverging experiences that make up human existence. We are often told to believe that our realities can be chosen, that the good life is achievable through sovereign decisions of private sacrifice and quiet endurance. Yet the novel’s eccentric and comically impulsive characters leave behind a different impression: perhaps life is a sum of contingencies, improbable and capricious. Sometimes, life simply happens in a certain way. If that is the case, why not welcome what is to come with a smile?
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LTI Korea Now
Literary Homecomings: A Dispatch from Los Angeles
Participating in LTI Korea’s “Korean Literature: Languages of Love and the Future” in Los Angeles and at the LA Times Festival of Books felt deeply personal to me. LA’s towering palm trees lining the 110 Harbor Freeway’s downtown exits and the University of Southern California’s red-brick Romanesque campus, the festival’s host site, reminded me of my doctoral studies in literature and creative writing. In 2001, during my first year as a USC PhD student, I began reading Korean poetry in translation in a Koreatown studio apartment overlooking Wilshire Avenue. My first encounter with Korean poetry took place on a Hewlett Packard laptop equipped with dial-up internet and Windows XP. Brother Anthony of Taizé’s extensive translations, featured on his Sogang University blog, introduced me to poets such as Kim Chi Ha, Kim Sowol, Ko Un, and Ku Sang. Brother Anthony’s writing inspired me to seek out translations of contemporary Korean poets, but few existed in the early aughts and usually only as part of an anthology published by a university or small press. Most of the available single-authored titles of Korean literature in my personal library came from White Pine Press’s Korean Voices Series—possibly the oldest US-English series devoted to contemporary and classic Korean poetry in translation. Returning to Los Angeles decades later as a member of LTI Korea’s delegation of writers was humbling and joyful. It was edifying to witness Korean literature’s robust, enthusiastic audience. At our events, there was no single sort of reader who attended. Readers ranged in age, identity, and background—perhaps a microcosm of LA’s cosmopolitan diversity. Yet they all shared a heartfelt excitement for Korean literature that moved me greatly, as I remembered how nascent its audience, beyond the academy, seemed almost three decades ago. Not only were English-translated works limited in number, but opportunities to hear Korean poetry in 2001 were fewer still. (YouTube launched and uploaded its first video in 2005.) At USC, my friend and fellow PhD student, Unhae Langis, whose ancestors include Kim Sowol, encouraged my literary interests. She introduced me to her father who recited “Azaleas” (진달래꽃) in Korean one evening after dinner at her West LA home. Although I didn’t know Korean then (and still rely on Konglish today to communicate with my relatives), I listened to the supple rhythms of Kim Sowol’s language and internalized them for poems of my own. In this way, Korean began writing on my senses and taught me, as an adoptee diasporic person, how to yearn. My role in “Korean Literature: Languages of Love and the Future” was to engage in a panel discussion with the poet Lee Min-ha. In an interview with Yonhap News that took place after the panel, Lee Min-ha said —or rather, I paraphrase— “Poetry is not read, but felt.” Guided by this shared belief, we made an impromptu change to our panel’s planned format and began our conversation inside California State University San Bernardino’s student union with the poet reading from her collection Phantom Limbs. I was delighted to present the English translation by Jein Han. We symbolically passed the book between us after we each presented to enact how poetry travels across linguistic differences to jolt a reader with lyricism and imagistic power. Our insightful moderator, the Korean literary critic Kang Dong-ho, asked us to ponder, “What do you believe poetry can do that no other art form can? And where do you see the power of poetry allowing it to connect with readers across the boundaries of a particular nation or culture?” Thinking about Lee seonsaengnim’s vigorous poetry, I admire how it reinvents language by creating new kinships among words that accrue into worlds of their own. Han’s nuanced translation carries this vibrancy into English such that the English-language words are remade and energized in unexpected contexts. For me, this visceral, aural experience is not unlike what I feel as I’m reading Korean poetry aloud to myself slowly and with the aid of a dictionary. Korean is writing on my inner life in ways that are helping me to reconcile forced distances and estrangement. But I am not alone. Because of the visionary, dedicated work of organizations like LTI Korea to grow and to nurture a talented community of literary translators, Korean literature is writing on the lives of readers around the world, who are also turning to its original imagery and provocative narratives to make sense of global forces shaping twenty-first-century human conditions. It’s an honor to participate in translated Korean literature’s astonishing, continuing story and to reflect, in this dispatch from Los Angeles, on its extraordinary rise and impact on global readers like myself. I’m thankful to LTI Korea for the gift of conversation with Lee Min-ha, Kang Dong-ho, and the delegation’s writers, and for the literary homecoming that was my festival experience.
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Book Cart
The Touch of Time / A Dream or Not a Dream / Ju and Yeon / That Woman Sleeping Under the Withered Cherry Tree
DayThe Touch of Time by Eun HeekyungMunhakdongne, 2026384 pagesA Dream or Not a Dream by Kim JunghyukAnon Books, 2026, 312 pagesCritically and popularly acclaimed writer Eun Heekyung is back with her newest novel, The Touch of Time. It tells the story of sisters Anna and Kyeongseon who, after decades of minimal contact, reconnect when a health check-up reveals that Kyeongseon has a renal tumor. As Anna cares for her ailing sister, the two women learn more about each other in their twilight years than they ever did before. “I wanted to write about the traces of time, space, and society that linger on the human body,” Eun writes in the Author’s Note. Through this tale of kinship and rediscovery, Eun demon¬strates how memories and past traumas can leave indelible marks on the human mind and body. In the world of A Dream or Not a Dream, GALA is a private dream immersion service that allows users to escape reality by spending time inside a dream. GALA is the brainchild of DALI, a corporation led by shady figures who aim to trap unsuspecting victims in a dream world forever so they can traffic their bodies. As an increas¬ing number of people become addicted to the artificial paradise that is GALA, the masterminds behind the program are forced to deal with a surprisingly powerful foe: the sincere, everyday bonds of ordinary humans. Full of humor and suspense, Kim’s novel offers sharp commentary on the true meaning of progress and resistance. Ju and Yeonby Cheong YeRabbit Hole, 2026300 pagesThat Woman Sleeping Under the Withered Cherry Treeby Kim Eon HeeMoonji, 2026 132 pagesAward-winning author of Orange and the Bread Knife (tr. Slin Jung), Cheong Ye returns with Ju and Yeon, an occult mystery about revenge and reincarnation. When Juhee’s father leaves their family in shambles after an extramarital affair, Juhee vows revenge. She enlists the help of a shaman to re¬incarnate as Yeonrin, the daughter of her father and his new wife, so she can facilitate their downfall. But when Juhee discovers that she still feels no joy even after exacting vengeance, she must grapple with what it is that she truly wants out of life. Ju and Yeon is a bold explora¬tion of love and loathing that asks readers what exists beyond retri¬bution, and what remains once our darkest fantasies are fulfilled.Originally published in 2000, That Woman Sleeping Under the Withered Cherry Tree was reissued this year as part of the Moonji Poetry Series. Readers are invited to discover the collection that sent shockwaves through the Korean literary scene and inspired passionate debate about the merits of Kim Eon Hee’s work. Kim foregrounds visceral descriptions of feces, blood, and genitals, subverting assumptions about womanhood and offering new perspectives on desire and the human body. “These poems are not suitable for the pregnant or elderly,” Kim says on the very first page. “These poems may cause vomiting, chills, fever, or arousal.” In other words, read at your own risk.
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Reviews
[TURKISH] When Grief Takes Shape
Hayaletin Kalbi First published in Korea in 2022, Lim Sunwoo’s collection of eight stories reached Turkish readers in 2026 as Hayaletin Kalbi, translated by Tayfun Kartav. In the collection’s title story, the narrator observes a version of herself step outside of her body before confessing: “The fact that I had not actually died left me deeply disappointed.” That sentence introduces the book’s central question: What happens when the body keeps going, but the heart has already started to leave the world? Throughout the collection, this tension between being alive and actually feeling alive becomes a recurring theme. Many of Lim’s characters are alive, but have withdrawn from life. Grief, insecure jobs, broken relationships, family pressure, and lost dreams have taken a toll on them. The ghosts, mutant jellyfish, rooted bodies, and hibernating people do not provide an escape from reality. Instead, they give hidden emotions a visible form. In Hayaletin Kalbi, the fantastic does not erase sorrow. It gives sorrow a body, a voice, or simply a place to rest. “Hayaletin Kalbi” (“With the Heart of a Ghost”) follows a bakery worker whose boyfriend, Jeongsu, has been in a coma for two years. Unlike many stories that would seek out the miracle, Lim rejects that possibility. Jeongsu does not wake up. Ultimately, the woman is waiting not because she still hopes for love but because she does not know how to leave. The story is strong precisely because it offers no solution to the suffering of the woman. Even though a ghost appears in the story, it does not offer her a solution to her sorrow but makes it impossible for her to continue avoiding it. These stories place grief directly inside the body. “Işık Saçmıyor” (“You’re Not Glowing”) and “Yaz, Suyun Rengi Gibi” (“Summer, Like the Color of Water”) both locate transformation as an intermediary phase between disappearance and rejuvenation. In the first story, an invasion of jellyfish generates an ominous industry where people wish to disappear. Services such as contracts, caretaking, and cleaning make that dream into a business. However, one of the jellyfish reconnects the narrator to her music career which she had abandoned. In the latter story, San plants himself in the floor after a breakup as a manifestation of his grief. The narrator can’t rescue him, but she can pull down the curtain, offer him water, and be beside him. Both stories ask what it means to stay with someone when there is no clear way to help. Lim’s answer is modest: Sometimes care can consist of water, shade, music, or company. “Kış Uykusundaki Adam” (“The Hibernating Guy”) uses the motif of retreat to make a socio-political commentary: While everybody else works and pays their rent, who has the privilege of sleeping throughout winter? “Alaska Değil Ama” (“Even Though It’s Not Alaska”) transforms a tale of vengeance into one of bereavement that blurs the boundaries between human and animal. Here, the wish to disappear is tied not only to grief but also to money, work, housing, and exhaustion. Lim never lets private pain float free from its material conditions. The last story, “Alkışa Çıkmak, Uzatmalar, Büyük Final” (“Curtain Call, Extra Inning, Last Pang”), provides a definitive response to that question. Granted one hundred hours of life after death, the narrator takes Irang to a specific stage in her life. Through this process, the narrator comes to realize that the disappearance of another person is still important. In Lim’s universe, perhaps this is the clearest indication of a living heart. The ending does not offer a grand return to life. It suggests something smaller and more believable: Caring about another person may be enough to remind us that some part of us still endures. Lim writes in a quiet, matter-of-fact style that is at times even humorous, and Kartav’s Turkish translation fluently recreates Lim’s rhythm and detachment. Ghosts and physical transformations coexist with bakery counters, hospital beds, unpaid bills, domestic work, and unemployment. Occasionally, the narrative follows a familiar pattern. An emotionally numb individual encounters the inexplicable and gradually returns to life, making certain conclusions rather predictable. Nonetheless, Lim never insists on the healing of her characters. Hayaletin Kalbi does not exhort weary individuals to stay strong. It stays beside them. Here, care is not a cure but a refusal to turn away from those who are fading away. This is also where Lim succeeds in her writing. She never forces emotions or overexplains. Rather, she leaves everything to the ordinary details and the reader’s imagination.
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Reviews
[ENGLISH] Two Women Living Together Is a World
Two Women Living Together The title of Two Women Living Together is deceptively straightforward. In their joint memoir, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo introduce themselves as longtime “singletons”—unmarried women living in single-person households—who, some years ago, decided to co-purchase a home in Seoul’s Mangwon neighborhood. Their memoir arrives amid headlines that routinely sound the alarm about South Korea’s plummeting birth rate and aging population—trends often attributed to rising living costs and an ever-stratifying labor market. Feminist and queer critics have stressed that patriarchy and heteronormativity are also at play, noting that same-sex marriage and adoption in South Korea remain illegal. The memoir became a bestseller upon its release in 2019, with over 56,000 copies sold to date. In forty-nine mini-essays, Kim and Hwang ponder the meanings of the life they have built as housemates, co-homeowners, and platonic life companions, addressing topics from splitting household duties (Kim does the dishes, Hwang does the cooking) to overarching questions of aging, caregiving, and entering each other’s extended families in midlife. The writing is warm and conversational, peppered with humor and affectionate interludes featuring the authors’ four cats, Haku, Goro, Tigger, and Young-bae. Gene Png’s English translation captures the resultant sense of camaraderie between the authors and readers with apparent ease. The memoir has also inspired a popular weekly podcast in Korea, Two Women Talking Together (여둘톡), where the authors discuss issues of work, relationships, and self-purpose. Kim and Hwang rarely narrate the significance of their partnership as an explicit response to systemic effects. The two met on Twitter, now X, while working in adjacent industries: Kim as a manager at a major marketing agency and Hwang as an editor at W Korea. Both had grown weary of living alone. The authors depict their decision to cohabit as an incidental effect of a friendship rooted in similar upbringings—growing up in Busan, moving to Seoul for university—as well as kindred tastes in music, drinks, and humor. But societal pressures to conform surfaced in day-to-day encounters. In one essay, Hwang recalls attending a dinner with a male guest who characterized marriageable women as “real gems” to be “excavated” by men. Hwang writes, “He demonstrated no regard whatsoever for these women’s humanity, treating them like exploitable goods with neither agency nor interests.” Most of the time, the authors’ abode provides refuge from such unwanted interpellations. However, at other moments, their home is the source of relational friction caused by disagreements about when to fold and put away the laundry or how to spend the holidays. These everyday frictions will ring familiar to anybody who has shared a home. Sometimes the issues Kim and Hwang face have deep roots. In one series of essays, the authors reflect on the challenges of taking out a loan to finance their apartment, a common path to homeownership in Seoul’s fierce housing market. Whereas debt in Hwang’s family was an “unwelcomed burden—something to be ashamed of and to get rid of quickly,” Kim looks back aghast at her “audacity to keep bugging Sunwoo about buying a house” together. Only in retrospect did Kim learn that, without Hwang’s name on the loan, her status as a freelancer would have likely disqualified her. Yet with enough patience and trust, the authors are able to turn their divergence over debt into a chance to explore their underlying attitudes toward work, finances, and responsibility. Discord over laundry routines turns out to be more about ingrained attachment styles. Curiosity about each other creeps in, presenting a chance to resolve conflict differently. In the space of friendship, the authors become each other’s mirror, both in conflict and in joy. “Stuck in an endless cycle of disappointment and forgiveness,” Kim writes, “we will never stop pinning our hopes on each other.” Two Women Living Together represents the possibility of reprieve from everyday scripts about who we ought to be—a marriageable woman, a trustworthy loan applicant, a respectable career holder—and from narratives that promise conformity as the antidote to abandonment. How Kim and Hwang show up for each other illuminates how care in relationships is not about effacing difference between people but about recognizing and upholding difference as a core component of intimacy. In a world where “two women living together” is a politicizable act, we can begin to enact wider possibilities for what partnership, care, and love look like, beginning with our own living rooms.
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Reviews
[ENGLISH] Pop Culture Goes Political
Project V The year is 2037, and Korea is on the brink of developing its first large-scale mech. In order to find a pilot, the government plans—what else?—a reality TV competition. Twenty-two-year-old Kim Wooram just happens to be one of the best mech engineers in the world. Winning the competition and piloting a cutting-edge mech feels like Wooram’s destiny, but there’s a slight problem: the competition is open to men only. Wooram decides to disguise herself as her twin brother, Boram, in order to enlist in the competition and fight for her dreams. Thus, the stage is set for Park Seolyeon’s latest novel, Project V. Park’s 2022 novel A Magical Girl Retires explored the beloved magical girl genre through a contemporary feminist lens. In Project V, artfully translated into English by Gene Png, Park turns her pen to another pop culture institution: mechs. The term “mech” or “mecha” refers to any number of humanoid robots. The concept has roots reaching back to science fiction writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, but its modern incarnation is generally credited to Japanese film and comics, with series like Astro Boy and Mazinger Z capturing people’s imaginations in the mid-twentieth century. 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam spawned one of the most enduring franchises in anime history, and 1995’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, with its profound explorations of the relationships between humans, spirituality, and technology, is widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time. Though Project V’s protagonist Wooram sees mechs as useful extensions of humans’ preexisting capabilities to help others, she isn’t so naive as to think that mechs aren’t ultimately viewed as weapons by the wider world. She reflects: “No country would ever admit that in the event of an emergency, their mechs would be deployed as war machines.” Indeed, the mech genre has proven to be fertile ground for nationalist and militaristic ideals—ideals that author Park subtly critiques throughout the novel. Following in this tradition, “V,” the mech Wooram competes to pilot, takes its inspiration from the 1976 film Robot Taekwon V. Though the film earned millions at the box office and remains a landmark of the Korean animation industry, Robot Taekwon V’s legacy has been tainted by the accusation that it disseminated anti-communist propaganda masquerading as children’s entertainment—a critique that could fairly apply to many stories in the mech genre and one that Park is clearly well aware of. Park’s own political leanings are no secret: her award-winning 2018 novel Capitalists Must Starve draws inspiration from labor activist Gang Juryong, while A Magical Girl Retires similarly explores themes of labor activism and trade unionism. Her works feature heroines who question authority and explode feminist stereotypes; Project V is no exception. Project V’s protagonist represents what a conscientious use of mech technology could look like. Wooram quickly distinguishes herself in the competition with her creative problem-solving skills and human-first approach. While other contestants are eager to display their dominance and brute strength, Wooram finds a way to face each new challenge while ensuring her fellow contestants remain out of harm’s way. Her skillset quickly sees her become a fan-favorite contestant and a top-three finalist. The irony that Wooram distinguishes herself in a male-dominated field by using more “feminine” skills is not lost on the reader. While Project V as a whole is a meditation on the mech genre, the book’s latter half takes a critical look at artificial intelligence. While large-scale superweapons like mechs may have encapsulated the Cold War-era’s technological fixations, governments and corporations around the world are now pouring money into the promise of AI’s efficient problem-solving skills. As a finalist, Wooram has the opportunity to pilot V, but her excitement at witnessing such cutting-edge technology is quickly replaced with profound concern. During their first interaction, V is cold and guarded, even asking Wooram, “Do I need a pilot?” As their conversations progress, Wooram suspects that the AI powering V is beginning to think and feel for itself. Her attempts to teach V compassion for human beings are met with violent resistance. What’s worse, Wooram’s warnings about V’s AI go unheeded after her identity as a woman is exposed and the sexist backlash takes precedence over national security concerns. After the explosive conclusion of Project V, readers aren’t served up any easy answers about the complex questions the novel raises. While Wooram is left reflecting on the fact that creations like V will always be reborn in one form or another, readers are likely to conclude that we need heroes like Wooram to rise and resist these powers. Though pop culture and politics are inextricably intertwined, the two don’t often intersect in the literary world. Park Seolyeon is forging a new path with stories that mirror the absurdity of our contemporary age—and posit a future of hopeful possibilities.
