K-Fiction Series features bilingual (Korean-English) editions of texts by the most interesting contemporary authors from South Korea. 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.
The World’s Most Expensive Novel tells the story of a 34-year-old writer who ironically summarizes her professional life. Sitting at her raspberry laptop, she tries to write something, making use of her doctorate in creative writing (which cost her $60,000), but instead of creating, she wonders about the value of such work, which will never bring her success even close to that of her young businessman brother.
Min-jung Kim radically summarizes the treatment of literature and the profession of writer in the modern world, separating them from intellectual tradition and reducing them almost to a machine that counts characters, which translates directly into money: 5 cents a word. A seemingly simple story about how different life paths of siblings can be, however, is an interesting commentary on the value of art in a capitalist economy.