Snow Hunters - Softcover

Yoon, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476714827 ISBN 13: 9781476714820

Publisher: S&s/ Marysue Rucci Books, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award, Snow Hunters is "a subtle, elegant, poignant read" (Oprah.com), featuring a Korean War refugee who emigrates to Brazil to become a tailor's apprentice and confronts the wreckage of his past.

"Exquisitely enigmatic...a small but radiant star in the current literary firmament" (The Dallas Morning News), Snow Hunters traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, a twenty-five-year-old North Korean POW refugee who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life in a port town on the coast of Brazil.

Though he is a stranger in a strange land, throughout the years in this town, four people slip in and out of Yohan's life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works, and who has his own secrets and a past he does not speak of; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named Santi and Bia, a boy and a girl, who spend their days in the alleyways and the streets of the town. Yohan longs to connect with these people, but to do so he must sift through the wreckage of his traumatic past so he might let go and move on.

In Snow Hunters, "quotidian-surreal craft-master" (New York magazine) Paul Yoon proves love can dissolve loneliness; that hope can wipe away despair; and that a man who lost a country can find a new home. "The brief, simple sentences that form this elegant tone poem of a novel...have the effect of making you slow down to read them--which is a fitting way to experience the story of a man unmoored by memory and time" (Entertainment Weekly). This is a heartrending story of second chances, told with unerring elegance and absolute tenderness.

About this title

Review:

"Yoon's gift as a writer is to reveal the meaning in the smallest moments...A subtle, elegant, poignant read."--

"The collection Once the Shore showcased Yoon's piercing powers of story and language; this novel continues his stunning trajectory with prose so pristine it feels supernatural."--Publishers Weekly

"At first glance Paul Yoon appears to be the perfect miniaturist, but behind every subtle gesture this novel shimmers with a deep and complex history. Snow Hunters is a beautiful and moving meditation on a solitary life."--Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto

"Paul Yoon's sentences are startlingly beautiful. Lucid and clean and resonant, they build, in Snow Hunters, to form a novel that is deceptively light and extraordinarily tender."--Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton

"Snow Hunters reads like a dream. In this quiet, evocative rendering, we espy lives muted by war, altered by loss and displacement, and ultimately mended by the salvaged threads of memories and love. Paul Yoon's writing intimates the emergence of a master stylist, each sentence a jewel to be admired."--Vaddey Ratner, author of In the Shadow of the Banyan

"Paul Yoon offers a profound look at the consequences of war, and what it means to begin a new life in the wake of its devastations...Brief in length, Snow Hunters is truly expansive in its scope, and written in language as clear and bracing as snowmelt."--Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles

"Paul Yoon proves himself well suited to the short form...the pleasures of Snow Hunters are many, and they begin with Yoon's prose, at once lyrical and precise...[the novel] is all the more powerful for its brevity."--Tatjana Soli "New York Times Book Review "

"Paul Yoon's slender novel Snow Hunters is exquisitely written--the kind of book that makes you think, this is the work of a writer's writer."--Roxanne Gay "The Nation "

"[A] quotidian-surreal craft-master."--New York Magazine

"The brief, simple sentences that form this elegant tone poem of a novel, called Snow Hunters, have the effect of making you slow down to read them."--Entertainment Weekly

About the Author:

Paul Yoon is the author of two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year. His novel Snow Hunters won the Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, and their dog, Oscar.

About this edition

• Publisher: S&s/ Marysue Rucci Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1476714827
• ISBN 13: 9781476714820
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224