Lost Souls: Stories

Hwang Sunwon; Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

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November, 2009
Cloth, 360 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14968-6
$27.50 / £19.00

"In this evocative collection, Korean novelist Hwang depicts the struggle of every man to survive in tumultuous mid-20th century Korea." — Publishers Weekly

"...a modernist piece of work..." — Korea Herald

"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

"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

Related Subjects

• Asian Literature

Series

• Weatherhead Books on Asia

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.

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