Lost Souls: Stories

by Sunwon Hwang, Bruce Fulton (Translator), Ju-Chan Fulton (Translator)

Overview

These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the Korean War.

Lost Souls echoes the exceptional work of China's Shen Congwen and Japan's Kawabata Yasunari. Modernist narratives set in the metropolises of Tokyo and Pyongyang alternate with starkly realistic portraits of rural life. Surrealist tales suggest the unsettling sensation of colonial domination, while stories of the outcast embody the thrill and terror of independence and survival in a land dominated by tradition and devastated by war.

Written during the chaos of 1945, "Booze" recounts a fight between Koreans for control of a former Japanese-owned distillery. "Toad" relates the suffering created by hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, and stories from the 1950s confront the catastrophes of the Korean War and the problematic desire for autonomy. Visceral and versatile, Lost Souls is a classic work on the possibilities of transition that showcases the innovation and craftsmanship of a consummate—and widely celebrated—storyteller.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231520508
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/19/2009
Series:	Weatherhead Books on Asia
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Hwang Sunwon (1915-2000) is one of modern Korea's most influential writers. His career ranges from the colonial 1930s to the industrial 1990s, and he is the author of more than one hundred stories, seven novels, and two collections of poetry. Four of his novels have been translated into English, most recently Trees on a Slope.

Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction and have received several awards and fellowships for their translations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship (the first ever awarded for a Korean translation into English) and a residency with the author Ch'oe Yun at the Banff International Literary Translation Center (the first ever awarded for a translation from an Asian language). The Fultons' most recent translation was the critically acclaimed work There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun.

Table of Contents

The Pond
Scarecrow
Adverbial Avenue
The Players
Trumpet Shells
Swine
The Broken Reed
Passing Rain
The Offering
The Gardener
Autumn with Piano
Mantis
Custom
Booze
The Toad
House
Bulls
To Smoke a Cigarette
My Father
The Dog of Crossover Village
Deathless
Lost Souls
Pibari
Voices
Afterword

What People are Saying About This

Theodore Q. Hughes

The strength of this important volume is its focus on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, not only offering us works that have not been translated before but also breaking down the colonial/postcolonial divide.

— Theodore Q. Hughes, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Jin-Kyung Lee

Notwithstanding the deep ideological divide that has structured the South Korean literary scene, Hwang Sunwon has always been acknowledged by many South Korean critics, from opposing camps, as one of the consummate masters of the short fiction genre. By rendering Hwang's beautifully crafted stories into equally superb English prose, Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton's translation introduces us to the universalist aesthetics Hwang endeavored to achieve, challenging the stereotyped and self-stereotyped notions of South Korean literature as narrowly ideological and politicized.

— Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

Editorial Reviews

In this evocative collection, Korean novelist Hwang (1915–2000) depicts the struggle of everyman to survive in tumultuous mid–20th-century Korea. In “Bulls,” Pau is riddled with guilt after seeing men brutalized and imprisoned by a Japanese constable collecting grain tax. The darkly ironic “Booze” follows Chunho, a devoted steward of the Nakamura distillery in Pyongyang, as he fights to maintain control after property is redistributed following the liberation of Korea from Japanese occupation in 1945. In the title story, Sogi witnesses his childhood love, Suni, sold as a concubine by her family. Sogi and Suni run away together only to discover that their love is true yet doomed. A distinction between North and South Korea in a contemporary sense is not obvious in Hwang’s stories, although the Korean War is the focal point of “Voices,” in which a disabled veteran returns home incapable of reintegrating into his rural society. Hwang beautifully depicts the lives of ordinary individuals, allowing a glimpse into a bygone era. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

...a modernist piece of work...

Korea Herald