Chinatown (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Jung-hee, Oh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241744369 ISBN 13: 9780241744369

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2025

Synopsis

A selection of the best short stories by Oh Jung-hee, one of South Korea’s most influential writers

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In ‘Chinatown’ a young girl living on the edge of the city’s Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in ‘The Garden Party’ a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

About this title

About the Author

Oh Jung-hee (Author)
Oh Jung-hee is often considered the grande dame of South Korean literature. Her work has received both the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Dong-in Literary Award, South Korea's most prestigious prizes for short fiction, and has been translated into multiple languages in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.

Bruce Fulton (Translator)
Bruce Fulton is Associate Professor and Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia. He has translated many major works of Korean literature over the past forty years.

Ju-Chan Fulton (Translator)
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the award-winning translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently Togani, a novel by Gong Ji-young (2023). Their translations of Korean short fiction appear in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Granta, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The New England Review. Bruce Fulton is the editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories (2023).

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241744369
• ISBN 13: 9780241744369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112