Bi-lingual Modern series features bilingual (Korean-English) editions of texts by the most interesting authors from South Korea, which make up the modern canon of the country’s literature. The editors emphasize that the selection of the best stories is crucial for them – but everything in these books is enjoyable: careful editing, aesthetics or an interesting study in the form of a commentary/essay offered after the main text.
Pak Taewon story is one of the most famous Korean texts in the world. Pak is considered an outstanding representative of modernism – readers will surely find similarities with Yi Sang’s prose, and looking a little further, for example, with Motojirō Kaji’s writing.
A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist is a short experimental novel. Pak describes twenty-four hours in the life of a young writer in former Seoul. He does this in a series of vignettes in which the narrative blurs amd the stream of consciousness of the characters (or maybe the author himself?) fluctuates. In the afterword to the book, you learn that Pak likes to mix tenses – present and past – and not always in logical places. His text is also densely punctured with footnotes, which makes a day in the life of Mr. Kubo resemble an extraordinary labyrinth.
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