Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in Singapore who works in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Korean
The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for wedging clay and firing clay in a kiln. Yeon Somin has set her second novel, The Healing Season of Pottery, in the Soyo Workshop and the quaint neighborhood where it’s situated. Similar in structure and tone to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and other comfort novels, the familiar coffee and cats are placed with a pottery studio that is new and different.
Eating out alone in Korea is not the done thing: minimum orders are often for three or four, and restaurants have an intensely communal atmosphere. Some coffee shops and restaurants have installed giant plush Moomins, Pengsoos and other characters so that solo drinkers won’t feel so alone (this may have inspired the cover of Table For One, which shows an anthropomorphic Zebra diner).
Healing fiction is currently hugely popular in South Korea, and has been since the 2022 release of Welcome to the Hyunam Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum. A raft of English translations are aiming to capitalize on the trend for all things hallyu to make Korean healing fiction an internationally known literary genre. This is a genre that aims to soothe readers exhausted by the pressures of a hypercompetitive and hierarchical society.
It seems that so little solid, verifiable information has reached the outside world from North Korea since the nation’s founding in 1948 that we might as well, in the manner of medieval cartographers, inscribe maps of the Korean Peninsula between the Yalu River and the Demilitarized Zone with illustrations of dragons and lions as an admission that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains terra incognita for outsiders. Happily, for those unable to read Korean, Columbia University Press has published an English translation of a memoir by a prominent defector who fills in some of the map.
Therapist Haesoo Lim used to appear on television to provide her professional opinion on matters in the news. But after speaking about a famous male actor, her career took a nosedive when the actor committed suicide. Haesoo not only lost her job, but her marriage also fell apart. Kim Hye-jin’s new novel Counsel Culture, translated by Jamie Chang, may be a small, contemplative book, but it packs a big punch with vibrant characters, both human and feline.
Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the colonial era (published from 1936 to 1941) and four in the postwar period (published from 1946 to 1952). Apart from “Walking in the Rain”, which she published in a bilingual edition in 2015, the stories in this book are available in English for the first time.