[KS] Publication Announcement: Bang Hyeon-seok's Fiction on Korean Memories of the Vietnam War

[Seung Hee Jeon]

*Publication Announcement: Time to Eat Lobster from Merwin Asia*


*T**ime *t*o *E*a*t *L**obs*t*er*

*Contemporary Korean Stories on Memories of the Vietnam War *

B*ang **H**yeon**-*S*eok*

Translated by Seung-Hee Jeon

Afterword by Lee Kyung-jae

ISBN 978-1-937385-76-7 Paper

ISBN 978-1-937385-77-4 Cloth

In his novellas *Time to Eat Lobster *and *Forms of Being *and the short
story “Rice and Soup,” Bang Hyeon-seok narrates the experiences of
post-Cold War South Koreans and Vietnamese coming to terms with their own
recent traumatic pasts at the same time as they form unusual bonds of love,
friendship, and understanding.

In this collection by a major contemporary South Korean novelist, we are
able to catch a rare glimpse of the recent historical evolution of
inter-Asian relationships in the capitalist U.S.-led post-World War II
world order through the characters’ enduring dreams and triumphs over their
individual pain and frustration.

*“In Bang Hyeon-seok’s *Forms of Being *and *Time to Eat Lobster*, there
are Koreans who neither impose their own ideals on the Vietnamese nor
detach themselves from them or exclude them from their lives. Koreans in
his works find the values, which they had in the past but lost along the
way, in Vietnam. This reality makes Vietnam a meaningful standard for
contemporary Korean lives, as Koreans can acknowledge uniquely Vietnamese
qualities while maintaining their own Korean identities, as shown in the
translation scene in *Forms of Being*. This attitude is the kind of ethical
ideal that Bang Hyeon-seok, who has always written for the underprivileged
and marginalized since the 1980s, finds in our contemporary age of
multiculturalism.”*

—From the Afterword by Lee Kyung-jae

*Seung-Hee Jeon *is a research professor at Yonsei University and a former
Korea Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute.


*Time to Eat Lobster was selected as one of 75 notable translations of 2015
by World Literature Today.*



-- 
Seung-Hee Jeon
Research Professor, Yonsei University
Senior Editor, Asia Publishers
617-872-1834
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