Contemporary and Classic Books by Korean and Korean American Authors

On the fictional island of Patusan — and much to the ire of the Patusan natives — the Korean conglomerate LK is constructing an elevator into Earth’s orbit, gradually turning this one-time tropical resort town into a gateway to and from our planet. Up in space, holding the elevator’s “spider cable” taut, is a mass of space junk known as the counterweight. And stashed within that junk is a trove of crucial data: A memory fragment left by LK’s former CEO, the control of which will determine the company’s — and humanity’s — future. Who will retrieve the data? Only time will tell. Counterweight is part cyberpunk, part hardboiled detective fiction, and part parable of South Korea’s neocolonial ambition and its rippling effects.

Thanks to a tiny transgression after school one day, Melody is shocked to discover that her parents have decided to move her and her mom out of New York City to join her father in Seoul — immediately! Barely having had the chance to say goodbye to her best friend before she’s on a plane, Melody is resentful and homesick. But she soon finds herself settling into their super-luxe villa, meeting cool friends at school, and discovering the alluring aspects of living in Korea — trendsetting fashion, delectable food, her dad’s black card, and a cute boy to explore the city with. Life in Seoul is amazing, until cracks begin to form on its glittering surface…

Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at the aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking. Ro’s only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager. When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro realizes she can either lose herself in the undertow of reminiscence, or finally come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.

A moving graphic memoir following Eddie Ahn, an environmental justice lawyer and activist striving to serve diverse communities in San Francisco amidst environmental catastrophes, an accelerating tide of racial and economic inequality, burnout, and his family’s expectations.

An exquisite collection from a breathtakingly new voice – centered on a constellation of Korean American families, these stories announce the debut of a master of short fiction.

Behind every assassination, there is an anonymous mastermind – a plotter – working in the shadows. Plotters quietly dictate the moves of the city’s most dangerous criminals, but their existence is little more than legend. Reseng is an assassin, and one day he steps out of line on a job. And when he uncovers an extraordinary scheme set into motion by an eccentric trio of young women – a convenience store clerk, her wheelchair-bound sister, and a cross-eyed librarian – Reseng will have to decide if he will remain a pawn or finally take control of the plot.

Hanya Yanagihara captured readers with her classic A Little Life, here she broadens her scope to tell a brilliant story that spans three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment. While each timeline focuses on a different cast of characters, they all show the aching desire to protect those we love, and the pain that ensues when we cannot.

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: How well did they actually know the woman they called Mom? Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

In this hilariously savage, poignant novel by acclaimed author Katherine Min, a grieving daughter’s revenge on the man who caused her mother’s death sets off a series of unexpected reckonings.

Internationally acclaimed author Hwang Sok-yong presents a tragic love story as two parallel lives. Set against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and South Korea’s political revolution of the eighties, The Old Garden is a tale of faith – in one’s country, to one’s ideals, and in one’s heart.

Seoul, 1978. At South Korea’s top university, the nation’s best and brightest compete to join the professional elite of an authoritarian regime. Two young women of vastly different means each struggle to find her own way during the darkest hours of South Korea’s “economic miracle.” In this sweeping yet intimate debut, Yoojin Grace Wuertz details four intertwining lives that are rife with turmoil and desire, private anxieties and public betrayals, dashed hopes and broken dreams — while a nation moves toward prosperity at any cost.

Korean American adoptee, Hara Wilson, is on a mission to find her place in the world and so she decides to travel across the ocean to find her birth mother in Seoul. Little did she know that when she arrived she would fall in love with the first man she laid eyes on. Choi Yujun is handsome, but also genuine and kind … and he also happens to be her stepbrother. Navigating this new life is tough enough but now this forbidden loves means having to choose between her birth family or Choi Yujun.

In this exhilarating novel, two friends — often in love, but never lovers — come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. Spanning thirty years, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

From bestselling author R. O. Kwon, an exhilarating, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life. Vital, bold, powerful, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: How brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

When a young girl is found dead in Seryong Lake, a reservoir in a remote South Korean village, the police immediately begin their investigation. At the same time, three men – Yongje, the girl’s father, and two security guards at the nearby dam, each of whom has something to hide about the night of her death – find themselves in an elaborate game of cat and mouse as they race to uncover what happened to her, without revealing their own closely guarded secrets.

A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania.

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

For Korean American Min, his life has never felt certain. Growing up in California he always felt “too Korean” to fit in, but when he decides to move to Seoul to better understand his heritage, he finds that assimilating has its own set of problems. There he meets Yu-jin, a beautiful and ambition girl who helps him find a sense of purpose. That is why he is dumbfounded when the police notify him that Yu-jin committed suicide. Devasted and in disbelief, he decides to look into why she might have wanted to kill herself, but the more he learns, the more he realizes he might not have really known her at all.

When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another in this thrilling page-turner, a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, the young, idealistic Chungpa Han arrives in a New York teeming with expatriates, businessmen, students, scholars, and indigents. Part picaresque adventure, part shrewd social commentary, East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation.

Welcome to the desert island of Mui, where a paid vacation to paradise is nothing short of a disaster in this “mordantly witty novel [that] reads like a highly literary, ultra–incisive thriller” (Refinery29).

A man wakes up in an unknown landscape, injured and alone, unable to recall the details of his life before. As he begins to navigate his surroundings, he comes across an old man, a crow, and a boy — and he realizes that nothing is what he thought it was, neither the present nor the past. Harrowing and haunting but also humorous in the face of the unfathomable, David Yoon’s City of Orange is a novel about reassembling the things that make us who we are, and finding the way home again.

Hannah, a Korean American girl from Queens, New York, and Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn, fall in love in the spring of 1993 at a quinceañera.  This reimagining of Romeo and Juliet is a sweeping, unforgettable story of an interracial couple in 1990s New York City who are determined to protect their love against all odds.

This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild — and to hatch an egg of her own. An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers.

In this sly and dazzling contemporary fantasy, the most notorious nine-tailed fox in Korea pairs up with a trickster god-turned-detective to track down a wrathful demon … before it can destroy the mortal world.

Set in Korea and the United States from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee’s stunning fiction debut illuminates a people struggling to reconcile the turmoil of their collective past with the rewards and challenges of their present. Amid the famine in North Korea, the financial crisis of South Korea, and the cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls of the United States, Krys Lee’s vivid and luminous tales speak to the political and financial hardships of life in Korea and the uniquely unmoored immigrant experience.

In this short story collection from one of South Korea’s most prominent young writers, Choi Eunyoung takes an unvarnished look at human relationships and the female experience through intimate portraits of the lives of young women living in South Korea.

From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea comes an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.

Written in 17th-century Korea, this classic novel’s wondrous story begins when a young monk living on a sacred Lotus Peak in China succumbs to the temptation of eight fairy maidens. For doubting his master’s Buddhist teachings, the monk is forced to endure a strange punishment: Reincarnation as the most ideal of men. The Nine Cloud Dream is an unforgettable tale that explores the meaning of a good life and the virtue of living simply with mindfulness.

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law, and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her.