 | Lost Souls: Stories Subjects: Short stories Korean -- Translations into English; Hwang Sun-wŏn 1915 -- Translations into English; Korea (South) -- Fiction; In this evocative collection, Korean novelist Hwang (1915-2000) depicts the struggle of everyman to survive in tumultuous mid-20th-century Korea. In "Bulls," Pau is riddled with guilt after seeing men brutalized and imprisoned by a Japanese constable collecting grain tax. The darkly ironic "Booze" follows Chunho, a devoted steward of the Nakamura distillery in Pyongyang, as he fights to maintain control after property is redistributed following the liberation of Korea from Japanese occupation in 1945. In the title story, Sogi witnesses his childhood love, Suni, sold as a concubine by her family. Sogi and Suni run away together only to discover that their love is true yet doomed. A distinction between North and South Korea in a contemporary sense is not obvious in Hwang's stories, although the Korean War is the focal point of "Voices," in which a disabled veteran returns home incapable of reintegrating into his rural society. Hwang beautifully depicts the lives of ordinary individuals, allowing a glimpse into a bygone era. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Hwang Sunwon (1915-2000) is one of modern Korea's most influential writers. His career ranges from the colonial 1930s to the industrial 1990s, and he is the author of more than one hundred stories, seven novels, and two collections of poetry. Four of his novels have been translated into English, most recently Trees on a Slope . Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction and have received several awards and fellowships for their translations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship (the first ever awarded for a Korean translation into English) and a residency with the author Ch'oe Yun at the Banff International Literary Translation Center (the first ever awarded for a translation from an Asian language). The Fultons' most recent translation was the critically acclaimed work There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun . |
