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A Map of the Heart, Guided by Literature: New Releases from March and April 2025 scrap download

문학이 이끄는 마음의 지도, 3월과 4월의 신간 도서입니다.

「KLWAVE introduces international readers to various works of Korean literature. “New Releases” features titles that have been published in March and April 2025, selected from Kyobo Book Centre’s “Book of the Month” and Aladin’s “Magician’s Choice” lists.」
 
When our hearts grow restless, we learn to walk again among clear, gentle sentences. We gather the scattered pieces of our hearts from the places we’ve been and the moments we’ve lived. And sometimes, we stumble upon parts of who we are that we never knew existed. From short stories and novels that cling to the fragments of life, to poetry that stays with us like a quiet companion, and to essays that gently remind us of the time we’ve let slip away—we present the new releases for March and April, each one ready to trace a path through your heart.
Do you remember the literary greetings that arrive like clockwork with each changing season? Reading Novels is Moonji Publishing’s quarterly series featuring carefully curated selections of “This Season’s Fiction.” Reading Novels: Spring 2025 brings three stories chosen for this spring: “The Bowerbird’s Garden” by Kang Bora, “Smooth” by Seong Haena, and “The Rest of the Summer” by Yoon Dan, each accompanied by an author interview.

Let’s spend some time with these three stories, where ordinary moments bloom into understanding and healing. As we watch wounds slowly mend and find quiet comfort in unexpected people and connections, we might discover that spring has quietly arrived in our own hearts as well.
Seong Haena, recently named the #1 “Young Writer Who Will Shape the Future of Korean Literature in 2024,” returns with her second short story collection, Honmono. As the title suggests—本物 (honmono) means “real thing” in Japanese—the book explores the blurred boundary between the real and the fake, constantly probing what we consider to be real. These stories settle uneasily on the jagged edge of the boundary where the real and the fake collide.

With an even sharper eye this time, Seong captures the fractures running through Korean society—regional rifts, generational divides, political tensions. As actor Park Jeong-min put in his endorsement, “Why watch Netflix when you could read Seong Haena’s book instead?” Her stories carry the vivid and visceral weight of real life. Her firm artistic commitment “to hook sentences with sharp claws, capture society’s pain with a broad gaze, and to listen with open ears to voices from the margins” echoes through the world of Honmono.
Baek Ohn-yu’s “A Fraction of a Fraction (Banuiban ui ban 반의반의 반)” has been named the grand prize winner of the 16th Young Writers' Award for 2025. This year’s honorees also include Kang Bora, Seo Jang-won, Seong Haena, Sung Hyeryung, Lee Heejoo, and Hyun Hojeong. Their seven stories reflect diverse perspectives on contemporary Korean society through the eyes of young novelists.

The grand prize-winning “A Fraction of a Fraction” stands out for its sensitive portrayal of life’s paradoxes and the intricacies of the human psyche—where expectation gives way to resentment, and doubt slowly transforms into belief. Centered on Yeong-sil, an elderly woman suffering from cognitive decline, the story illuminates the fragile reality of an aging woman, whose trust must often be placed in strangers rather than family. Each work in this collection, no matter the author or page, is imbued with a voice that is melancholy yet beautiful, grotesque yet rich with elegant irony—the most brilliant young prose of our time.
Choi Hyeon-jin’s Sparkle has been selected as the winner of the 18th Changbi Young Adult Literature Award. The novel centers on a protagonist who, after receiving a corneal transplant in their right eye following an accident five years prior, embarks on a journey of healing—confronting buried emotional wounds and learning to see the world anew.

While we all fear losing our footing, perhaps it is only through moments of imbalance that we truly find our center. Sparkle explores the infinite potential within our imperfect, uncertain steps. The novel shines a warm light not only on the world before us but also on the feelings we’ve suppressed and the pain carried by others, offering young readers both deep comfort and a broadened perspective as they continue seeking their place in the world.
Poet Park Joon, known for carving out a uniquely tender emotional voice in Korean poetry through I Took Medicine Called You for a Few Days and We May See the Rainy Season Together, returns with his third collection, Without Greeting, Without Farewell. In this new poetry collection, he offers a quiet but warming touch to the things we’ve lost along life’s way and the empty spaces left behind in fading memories.

For those who have waited for someone they couldn’t let go of—and for those who, despite already saying goodbye, remain waiting—Park Joon doesn’t rush to console their sorrow. Instead, he stays beside us in the space sorrow has carved out, allowing us to observe the emptiness in the quiet. His poems resonate deeply through their restraint, as in the lines “Soundlessly / following along / only with the shape of lips” (from “New Moon and New Life”), reminding us that sometimes silence carries more weight than speech. To listen closely to what is left unsaid, to feel the currents that move through the silences the poet so carefully crafts—this is our task as we open the pages of Without Greeting, Without Farewell.
Following her 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang returns with a new book: Light and Thread. The ninth volume in Moonji Publishing’s prose series “Moonji Écrits,” this book weaves together her Nobel Prize acceptance lecture—also titled “Light and Thread”—with previously unpublished poems, prose, journal entries, and photographs taken by the author herself.

Han Kang’s reflections in moments of quiet daily life unfold with the delicacy and clarity of light. She writes that literature—“language that connects us to one another”—inevitably holds a kind of “body heat.” Through Light and Thread, readers are invited to step into that current of literature with warmth and resonance.
After 30 years, Kim Chang-wan’s first essay collection returns to readers in a revised and expanded edition. The vocalist of the Kim Chang-wan Band, also beloved as an actor and television host, Kim brings new depth to this edition with five newly written essays, three poems, and twenty additional pieces of artwork that reflect his thoughtful approach to life. These heartfelt reflections drawn from a place of deep introspection resonate quietly.

“Now I can see.” These simple words capture the beauty of life discovered at the far end of time’s passage, the wonder, and the gentle encouragement. This book is for anyone hoping to finally recognize the precious moments we so often let slip by—the fleeting yet meaningful fragments of a life in which we’re always “just now seeing.”
Writer Jeong Shin has spent years collecting receipts from her daily life—a habit she began at the age of 23. Now, at 40, her collection numbers over 25,000 receipts. 40-Year-Old Jeong Shin and Receipts is a record of small yet tangible fragments, each one a testament to the people she has loved and the self she has worked to preserve.

Each receipt holds the warmth of a single day, capturing not just a transaction but a lived moment. These numerous slips of paper, never carelessly discarded, transcend their original purpose—they become portals to memory, evoking objects and places, as well as traces of feelings, landscapes and love that shaped her daily life. Together, they form a journal and a chronicle and a tangible proof of love and life.
Moments of Gathering is a collection of essays by poet Ahn Heeyun, drawn from her reflective travels, embarked upon with the purpose of “gathering.” Divided into four sections, the book explores different kinds of journeys: through youth, art, people, and, ultimately, poetry itself.

In those sharp, heart-piercing moments, a flood of emotions moves through the author and settles into the collection box of travels. The cycles of failing and returning, drifting apart and finding our way back—Ahn Heeyun embraces all of these winding experiences as forms of travel. She reminds us that every moment leaves its trace. Whether grand or small, radiant or unremarkable, each is a stop along the journey toward love. And just around the next corner waits a version of ourselves from long ago—imperfect, clumsy, yet burning with more passion than anyone—waving hello. What are you gathering in your own life?


Written by Seojeong Lee(Korean Literature Outreach Team)


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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