Jennifer Lee
Short story collection “Bliss Montage” portrays women’s lives with a surreal flair
Perhaps the novel that seemed most prescient or relevant to the end-of-world times that was 2020 was Ling Ma’s Severance, an apocalyptical satire about a pandemic that starts in China and dooms infected...
A Korean page-turner about a 65-year-old woman assassin
When you think of a 65-year-old woman, what does your brain conjure up? Perhaps you see her taking care of her grandchildren or socializing with other seniors in a community space, a senior living...
Interview with author Jane Pek on The Verifiers
The Verifiers is about Claudia Lin, a woman who inadvertently stumbles upon a murder mystery when one of her work clients becomes a victim. Claudia works for Veracity, an online-dating detective agency. The story...
Viscerally-upsetting short story collection makes readers question their own sense of normalcy
Anyone who has read Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings are already well-acquainted with Murata’s quirkiness and unconventionality. Murata has admitted in interviews she has always felt like an outsider—an alien—which might be...
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki boldy breaks the silence...
Sehee Baek’s crowdfunded book “I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki” became an unexpected bestseller when it was first published in Korea in 2018. Since then, a second volume had been...
‘All the Lovers of the Night’ is a stark look at one woman’s emotionally...
“All the Lovers of the Night,” the latest English-translated book from Mieko Kawakami, the
acclaimed author of international bestseller “Breasts and Eggs,” questions the meaning of
happiness by exploring Japanese society through the eyes of Fuyuko...
Writer Lan Samantha Chang talks about food, family drama, writing immigrant characters against stereotypes,...
Lan Samantha Chang. Photo by IfeOluwa Nihinlola
Writer Lan Samantha Chang is the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, Inheritance, Hunger, and most recently, The Family Chao, published in February 2022. Chang is...
Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is a grim warning
For people who find themselves remembering the past—or even things others tell them—more than others, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa might hit a chord. Originally published 28 years earlier in Japan in time...
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel The Waiting shows that the pain of the Korean...
“The generation that experienced the Korean War is dying, and with them, the painful memories are disappearing too. The current generation has little interest in the reunification of the two Koreas. They dismiss the...
An unsolved murder in Lemon and a dystopian eco-thriller in The Disaster Tourist are...
Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun
Memory is not something that can accurately be relied upon to bear witness to a crime, especially if it happened 16 years ago from the perspective of someone who did not...