What are the best Korean short story collections? Check out these books from South Korea to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Korea.
Best Korean Short Stories Books
1) Park Seongwon - What Makes a City?
The writing style (or translation) made the stories more intense and had the power to draw my mind into the world inside the book. The book provides you with possible meanings and messages, but you can come up with many more while considering how it applies to your life and the way you live. What Makes a City? is not a book to read from cover to back, but rather one where you read a story a day and ponder on the meaning of that single story.Â
What Is It That Makes Up a City? provides the reader with an intelligent perspective on the strange culture of our times and a series of adventures through which we explore universal human problems. Family, education, the media, popular culture, technology, alienation, financial power or the lack thereof . . . These are among the most prominent components of the eight stories which comprise this book, in which characters struggle—sometimes in despair, but usually with a sense of humor—to understand or at least accept their place in a world that often makes no sense.
2) Bae Myung-hoon - Tower
Tower is a mirror of society; a sci-fi depiction of social and political issues. It is intense, subtle and funny.
Tower is a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. Each story deals with how citizens living in the hypermodern high-rise deal with various influences of power in their lives: a group of researchers have to tell their boss that a major powerbroker is a dog, a woman uses the power of the internet to rescue a downed fighter pilot abandoned by the government, and an out-of-towner finds himself in charge of training a gentle elephant to break up protests. Bae explores the forces that shape modern life with wit and a sly wink at the reader.
Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Tower
3) Bora Chung - Cursed Bunny
Bora Chung will amuse you with all the unusual things that are considered perfectly ordinary.
Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.
Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous.Â
4) Choi Eunyoung - Shoko's Smile
It takes skill to write and translate a scene that makes the reader sympathize so strongly with a character, both while reading and when thinking about the book weeks later.
In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In ‘A Song from Afar’, a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, travelling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In ‘Secret’, the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother.
5) Kim Bo-young - I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories
An immersive, sci-fi short story collection that takes you to another time and place. Find out what a talking wall and Artificial Intelligence have in common, and how AI and gods share some similarities.
In the title story, an engaged couple working in distant corners of the galaxy plan to arrive on Earth simultaneously and walk down the aisle together. But small incidents wreak havoc on their vast journeys, pushing the date of their wedding far into the future. As centuries pass on Earth and the land and climate change, one thing is constant: the desire of the lovers to be together.
Through two pairs of interlinked stories, Kim Bo-young explores the driving forces of humanity – love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence.
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Read my review of I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories
6) Ha Seong-nan - Flowers of Mold
The stories challenge you to understand them and to grasp their underlying meaning. Most of them take place in various neighborhoods in Seoul.
Praised for her meticulous descriptions and ability to transform the mundanity of everyday life into something strange and unexpected, Ha Seong-nan bursts into the English literary scene with this stunning collection that confirms Korea’s place at the forefront of contemporary women’s writing. From the title story told by a woman suffering from gaps in her memory, to one about a man seeking insight in bags of garbage, to a surreal story about a car salesman and the customer he tries to seduce, The Woman Next Door charms and provokes with an incomparable style.
7) Ha Seong-nan - Bluebeard's First Wife
If you’re looking for stories that make you question everything you read, then read this book.
Disasters, accidents, and deaths abound in Bluebeard’s First Wife. A woman spends a night with her fiancé and his friends, and overhears a terrible secret that has bound them together since high school. A man grows increasingly agitated by the apartment noise made by a young family living upstairs and arouses the suspicion of his own wife when the neighbors meet a string of unlucky incidents. A couple moves into a picture-perfect country house, but when their new dog is stolen, they become obsessed with finding the thief, and in the process, neglect their child. Ha’s paranoia-inducing, heart-quickening stories will have you reconsidering your own neighbors.
8) Kang Kyeong-ae - The Underground Village
A storybook giving insight into the lives of those that came before us. Placeless stories, sometimes timeless, showing the harsh reality of life.
Kang Kyeong-ae (1906-1944) was a Korean writer whose stories are remarkable for their rejection of colonialism, patriarchy, and ethnic nationalism during a period when such views were truly radical and dangerous. Born in what is now North Korea, Kang wrote all her fiction in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and witnessed the violence and daily struggles experienced by ethnic Koreans living in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Kang’s riveting stories are full of sensitivity, defiance, and a deep understanding of the oppressed people she wrote about.
Kim Un-su - The Cabinet
A mind-bending work of literary fiction from one of South Korea’s hottest new novelists.
Cabinet 13 looks like an old, ordinary cabinet. But it is filled with stories – peculiar, strange, eye popping, disgusting, enraging, and touching stories. The life of the man who manages cabinet 13, an ordinary office manager, is similarly filled with stories. Un-Su Kim intricately interweaves the all these stories with precise prose and in rich style, and will leave you thinking about the stories inside your own cabinet long after you turn the final page.
Buy from Amazon (available 12 October 2021)
Kim Jung-hyuk - The Library of Musical Instruments
The second short-story collection by Kim Jung-hyuk, the author of Penguin News, features a total of eight short stories, including Syncopation D which won the 2nd Kim You-jeong Literary Award in 2008. They represent the many sounds sampled by the author when he recorded over 600 kinds of musical instruments. Like instruments coming together in a symphony, the stories combine to make an opus consisting of variations on a theme. While the stories begin in an upbeat fashion and work to a crescendo, they end with notes in a minor key filling the vacuum. The Library of Musical Instruments is a collection to contemplate on more than one occasion.”
Sue Ja Joo - Night Picture of Rain Sound
Seventeen short stories transcending the line between fantasy and reality. Sue Ja Joo is on the frontier of ‘Smart Fiction’. A new genre between poetry and the short story, unique to the Korean literary world. ‘Night Picture of Rain Sound’ opens the small door in the corner where certitude is imagination, and imagination is certitude. ‘Night Picture of Rain Sound’ creates a world where it’s possible to run into Don Quixote at the store or discuss physics with Einstein in a café.Â
Jung Young-moon - A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories
Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon’s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung’s stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or negativity. Instead, we find a world in which the bizarre and terrifying are often put to comic use, even in direst of situations, and point toward a sort of redemption to be found precisely in the weirdest and most unsettling parts of life.
Kim Bo-young - On the Origin of Species and Other Stories
Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.
Kim Tongin - Sweet Potato
Kim Tongin (1900-1951) is one of Korea’s earliest and most respected modern writers whose naturalist fiction brilliantly depicts Korean life during a period of profound social change. Namesake of the prestigious Dong-in Literary Award, Kim Tongin’s succinct writing style can still inspire readers and provide insight into early 20th century Korea over 60 years after his death.
Translated by Grace Jung and introduced by Youngmin Kwon, Adjunct Professor of Korean Literature at the University of California, Berkley.
Jeon Sungtae - Wolves
Sungtae’s short stories build a unique world through their consummate construction and firm roots in reality. With Mongolia as the physical background and through the perspectives of outsiders, Jeon’s imaginative tales mercilessly expose the hypocrisy and duality that lie within all of us. The stories address important issues including North-South Korean relations, migrant workers, capitalism in an era of neo-liberalism, and racially mixed families.
Yi Sang - The Wings
The three stories gathered in this volume display Yi Sang’s inventive manipulation of autobiographical elements, a method which expands his intensely private narratives into broader meditations on love, life, and death. “The Wings,” a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. “Encounters and Departures,” a tale of ill-fated love revolving around erotic passion and physical illness as metaphors presents a female protagonist modelled on the woman who was, in real life, the author’s muse and femme fatale. Similarly, in “Deathly Child,” Yi Sang offers a witty, incisive examination of sexual mores through a fictional reenactment of his ambivalent feelings toward the woman he married toward the end of his life.
Chul-Woo Lim - The Dog Thief
As a college student, Chul-Woo Lim witnessed the Kwangju Uprising during which hundreds of prodemocracy protesters were massacred by the South Korean government of Chun Doo Hwan. Lim’s desire to bear witness to this tragic event became one of the motivating forces behind his writing. One year after the massacre, Lim published his first short story, The Dog Thief.
