Short stories
타령
Not translated into English
Choe Il-lam · 1977
Synopsis
The collection brings together short stories, including the one that gives it its title, published in Hyundae Munhak in November 1976: five short narratives about market people, which the Translation Institute says are devoted to death, love and earning a living, those ordinary moments of which life is made. According to Nocut News, the author portrays the hardships of city life for the uprooted and the shadow of industrialisation, with a satire mixed with humour; it has been noted that the industrialising city there always rests on the relative poverty of the countryside.
Context
The collection appeared in 1977 from Minumsa, two years after the one that had opened the series of his stories about the people of Seoul. Its author, a journalist by profession, had published little in the fifties and sixties, then a great deal from the seventies onwards, and his stories after 1980 turned towards everyday selfishness. The Seoul Shinmun places his years as head of his newspaper's culture desk in 1963-1977: the collection appeared in the very year he left that post.
Who it is for
A collection of brief short stories; no translation of the collection is recorded, but other narratives by the author exist in English.
Prizes and reception
One of the author's short stories appears, under the title Ballad, in the anthology Modern Korean Fiction published in 2005.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.