"Shin’s prose, intimate and hauntingly spare in this translation by Chi-Young Kim...powerfully conveys grief’s bewildering immediacy.... [A] raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood." —The New York Times

A million-plus-copy best seller in South Korea and poised to become an international sensation—Please Look After Mom is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, and of the desires, heartaches, and secrets they discover she harbored within.

On a family visit to the city, Mom is right behind her husband when the train pulls out of Seoul Station without her, and she is lost, possibly forever. As her children argue over how to find her and her husband returns to their countryside home to wait for her, they each recall their lives with her, their memories often more surprising than comforting. Have they lived up to her expectations? Was she happy? Through the piercing voices of daughter, son, and husband, and through Mom’s own words in the novel’s shattering conclusion, we learn what happened that day, and explore an even deeper mystery—of motherhood itself.

At once steeped in the beauty and complexities of the East and rich with a universal tenderness, Please Look After Mom has a revelatory emotional power. You will never think of your mother the same way again after you’ve read this book.

Winner of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.

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"Perhaps the most intriguing and accomplished Korean fiction yet to appear in English translation." —Kirkus Reviews

A foreign film importer, Ki-yong is a family man with a wife and daughter. An aficionado of Heineken, soccer, and sushi, he is also a North Korean spy who has been living among his enemies for twenty-one years.

Suddenly he receives a mysterious email, a directive seemingly from the home office. He has one day to return to headquarters. He hasn’t heard from anyone in over ten years. Why is he being called back now? Is this message really from Pyongyang? Is he returning to receive new orders or to be executed for a lack of diligence? Has someone in the South discovered his secret identity? Is this a trap?

Spanning the course of one day, Your Republic Is Calling You is an emotionally taut, psychologically astute, haunting novel that reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the way in which we sometimes never really know the people we love. Confronting moral questions on small and large scales, it mines the political and cultural transformations that have transformed South Korea since the 1980s. A lament for the fate of a certain kind of man and a certain kind of manhood, it is ultimately a searing study of the long and insidious effects of dividing a nation in two.

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"Food is a well-traveled literary metaphor, but here, in a translation by Chi-Young Kim, Jo does marvelous and disturbing things with it, serving up dishes rich with a variety of feelings." —The New York Times Book Review

An erotically charged, elegantly written novel that marks the first publication in English of author Jo Kyung Ran, a glamorous literary star in Korea who has earned comparisons to Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, and Alessandro Baricco.

Emotionally raw and emphatically sensual, Tongue is the story of the demise of an obsessive romance, and a woman's culinary journey toward self-restoration and revenge. When her boyfriend of seven years leaves her for another woman, the celebrated young chef Jung Ji-won shuts down the cooking school she ran from their home and sinks into deep depression, losing her will to cook, her desire to eat, and even her ability to taste. Returning to the kitchen of the Italian restaurant where her career first began, she slowly rebuilds her life, rediscovering her appreciation of food, both as nourishment and as sensual pleasure. She also starts to devise a plan for a final, vengeful act of culinary seduction.

Tongue is a voluptuous, intimate story of a gourmet relying on her food-centric worldview to emerge from heartbreak, a mesmerizing, delicately plotted novel at once shocking and profoundly familiar.

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"Coolly written and composed as intricately and artfully as a Chinese box.... The result is eerie, hypnotic and not without humor, like latter-day Camus filtered through a cinematic sensibility." —Los Angeles Times

In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula. Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its authorÍs greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation.

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"Brilliant." —Charles Montgomery, The Korea Herald

Toy City, a poignant coming-of-age story of a fourth-grade boy named Yun, depicts the life of a poor family struggling to survive in the years immediately after the Korean War. An autobiographical work, the novel is written entirely from young Yun's point of view. While the political ramifications of the Korean War are suggested throughout, they do not take center stage in this tale of a boy forced to grow up quickly to support his family. Yun copes with tremendous losses, but manages to find joy in everyday occurrences. Lyrical, passionate depictions of hunger, shame, and frustration are interspersed throughout the descriptions of children's games, Yun's budding sexuality, and the kind acts of neighbors, illuminating the conditions under which poor Koreans lived after the War. Vacillating between bitterly ignoring his family and remaining close to them, Yun struggles to come to terms with the sudden realization that he cannot depend on his mother, father or older sister for anything. Stunningly capturing the wishes, hopes and anger of a young boy, Toy City is a graceful study of the vulnerable toughness of a child thrust into a chaotic early adulthood. Alternately heart-wrenching and hopeful, this masterpiece is a must for those interested in the impact of war on everyday life and the underclass of 1950s Korean society.

Awarded The Daesan Foundation Translation Grant in 2005.

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