Based on actual events, The Guest is a profound portrait of a divided people haunted by a painful past, and a generation's search for reconciliation. During the Korean War, Hwanghae Province in North Korea was the setting of a gruesome fifty-two day massacre. In an act of collective amnesia the atrocities were attributed to American military, but in truth they resulted from malicious battling between Christian and Communist Koreans. Forty years later, Ryu Yosop, a minister living in America returns to his home village, where his older brother once played a notorious role in the bloodshed. Besieged by vivid memories and visited by the troubled spirits of the deceased, Yosop must face the survivors of the tragedy and lay his brother's soul to rest. Faulkner-like in its intense interweaving narratives, The Guest is a daring and ambitious novel from a major figure in world literature.

The Guest: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Sok-Yong, Hwang

United States

Seven Stories Press

Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history. Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.

The Old Garden

Literary

As South Korea violently changed from a military dictatorship to a democratic state, an idealistic activist and a brazen painter shared a brief love affair that would impact the rest of their lives. Drifting to an old house in the countryside where they once sought refuge, Hyun Woo finds Yoon Hee's letters, diaries, and paintings that document the extraordinary life of the woman he loved and lost. He recalls the circumstances that brought him to Yoon Hee and the lifetime they spent apart. As his world shrank in prison, hers expanded as she fought off the loneliness of his absence and witnessed the dramatic events of their country's recent history, the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and the harsh natural landscape of Siberia. He also learns that she has left him a living legacy that will help him find his way again. Hyun Woo is fleeing authorities for his participation in the Kwangju Uprising and for promoting democracy in South Korea when he meets and falls in love with Yoon Hee. Their idyllic time together is cut short when Hyun Woo is captured and thrown in prison. Nearly two decades later, he is released to find Korea aggressively modernized, democratic in name, but filled with inequality and corruption. His former comrades are old and jaded, and Yoon Hee, never allowed to see him during his imprisonment, has died. Internationally acclaimed author Hwang Sok-yong presents a tragic love story as two parallel lives. Set against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and South Korea's political revolution of the eighties, The Old Garden is a tale of faith--in one's country, to one's ideals, and in one's heart.

A novel of the black markets of the South Vietnamese city of Da Nang during the Vietnam War, based on the author’s experiences as a self-described South Korean mercenary on the side of the South Vietnamese, this is a Vietnam War novel like no other, truly one that sees the war from all sides. Scenes of battle are breathtakingly well told. The plot is thick with intrigue and complex subplots. But ultimately The Shadow of Arms is a novel of the human condition rather than of the exploits and losses of one side or the other in war.

The Shadow of Arms

The essential account of the South Korean 1980 pro-democracy rebellion\nOn May 18, 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d’état and the martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with unmitigated violence. Over the next ten days hundreds of students, activists, and citizens were arrested, tortured, and murdered. The events of the uprising shaped over a decade of resistance to the repressive South Korean regime and paved the way for the country’s democratization.\nThis fresh translation by Slin Jung of a text compiled from eyewitness testimonies presents a gripping and comprehensive account of both the events of the uprising and the political situation that preceded and followed the violence of that period. Included is a preface by acclaimed Korean novelist Hwang Sok-yong.\nGwangju Uprising is a vital resource for those interested in East Asian contemporary history and the global struggle for democracy.

Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea

History

Jae-Eui, Lee

Yong-Ho, Jeon

Asia

Verso

Product Description A sweeping account of imprisonment--in time, in language, and in a divided country--from Korea's most acclaimed novelistIn 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject--of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart.In this capacious memoir, Hwang moves between his imprisonment and his life--as a boy in Pyongyang, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad--and in so doing, narrates the dramatic revolutions and transformations of one life and of Korean society during the twentieth century. Review “This sweeping, epic account is not just a memoir but rather a knowledgeable, sensitive and informed insight into Korea and its neighbours, as well as a complex, nuanced examination of the Cold War, its geopolitical consequences and its human cost. Hwang Sok-yong moves effortlessly between the personal and the political, and the geopolitical, and like his novels, his concerns are both compassionately individual and passionately global. The Prisoner is also a literary tour de force. Written in the lyrical, elegant style, with powerful acuity and razor-sharp wit that are hallmarks of Sok-Yong’s work, it coaxes the reader to savour images, memorable events, and poignant details while also demanding a comprehensive ethical commitment to freedom, justice, and a moral universe.”—Sunny Singh “Hwang Sok-Yong’s photographic memory yields vitally important historic testimonies: to the trials of his imprisonment, to life in South as well as North Korea under unchecked power, to the dynamism, humanity, persistence and resilience of artists alone and together against injustice. The Prisoner is an invaluable document, a thorough and eye-opening sweep of the past. Translators Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell have done a remarkable job of conveying the political and emotional nuances of language in their source material, and we as grateful readers are all the better for it.”—Khairani Barokka “Hwang Sok-yong is Korea’s leading political novelist. His new book, The Prisoner, is every bit as riveting and deeply informed is anything he has written. The author has a political sensibility that illuminates a number of important episodes in Korea’s recent political history, with one trenchant observation after another about both the North and the South. His harrowing experience as a political prisoner under the South Korean dictatorship leaves an indelible black mark on a regime that the United States supported for 40 years, and that Hwang courageously fought every day of his life until the dictatorship finally collapsed.”—Bruce Cumings, historian at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Korean War: A History “Epic in its scope … a passionate, detailed memoir.”—Kristine Morris, Foreword Reviews About the Author Hwang Sok-yong is the recipient of the highest literary prizes in Korea and across Europe. His writing, exploring the troubled history of a violently divided Korea, has achieved international acclaim, and his status as as an imprisoned, exiled, and dissident author has been championed by World PEN. His many novels include At Dusk, Familiar Things, and The Guest.

The Prisoner: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Familiar Things

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

Scribe Publications

Mater 2-10

Romance

Scribe UK

A vivid and enchanting novel by one of South Korea’s foremost writers, in a haunting reminder to be careful what we throw away. Seoul. On the outskirts of South Korea’s glittering metropolis is a place few people know about: a vast landfill site called Flower Island. Home to those driven from the city by poverty, is it here that 14-year-old Bugeye and his mother arrive, following his father’s internment in a government “re-education camp”. Living in a shack and supporting himself by weeding recyclables out of the refuse, at first Bugeye’s life on Flower Island is hard. But then one night he notices mysterious lights around the landfill. And when the ancient spirits that still inhabit the island’s landscape reveal themselves to him, Bugeye's luck begins to change―but can it last? Vibrant and enchanting, Familiar Things depicts a society on the edge of dizzying economic and social change, and is a haunting reminder to us all to be careful of what we throw away.

Scribe US

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sok-Yong, Hwang. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sok-Yong, Hwang

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sok-Yong, Hwang. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Guest: A Novel

The Guest: A Novel

The Old Garden

The Old Garden

The Shadow of Arms

Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea

The Prisoner: A Memoir

Familiar Things

Mater 2-10

Familiar Things