Book World features the work of Hwang Sun-wŏn, one of Korea's greatest living writers. Both popular with the reading public and highly praised by critics, Hwang's stories are among the most widely and frequently translated works of Korean literature. For more than fifty years Hwang has fascinated and beguiled readers with his deceptively simple, emotionally rich stories of peasant farmers, shamans, soldiers, and ghetto dwellers of modern Korea.
Although an accomplished novelist and poet, Hwang is chiefly known as a master of the short story, a form to which Korean readers attach the utmost significance. In Korea the short story, together with poetry, is regarded as a major literary genre by serious readers and writers. An excellent short story will receive much critical applause, while a number of popular novels go unnoticed. (This is party due to the fact that newspapers print novels in serial form, and "serial-writing" is often perceived as an artistic degradation.)
In the following pages readers will find two of Hwang's stories, "Old Man Hwang," composed early in his career his career, and "My Story of the Bamboo Lady," one of his most recent compositions. These stories bracket Hwang's career and give evidence of his creative range. The former is excerpted from a new collection of Hwang's stories, Shadows of a Sound (Mercury House: 1990); the latter is published here for the first time in English translation.
Following the stories are critical responses by three expert translators of Korean literature. J. Martin Holman ("Memory and Epiphany," p.356) sketches the tragic and turbulent historical events that have buffeted Hwang but
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