Lifestyle - The Korea Times

'Pachinko' author’s next novel examines Korea’s passion for education

Min Jin Lee, the bestselling author of the global sensation "Pachinko," will return this fall with a new novel titled "American Hagwon," focusing on the intense Korean commitment to private education. Cardinal, the publisher of Lee’s new book, said Wednesday that “American Hagwon” is scheduled for release on Sept. 29. It marks the third installment in Lee’s "diaspora quartet," following "Free Food for Millionaires" (2007) and "Pachinko" (2017). The term "hagwon" in the title refers to Korean private tuition companies that provide intensive after-school lessons. Lee explained that her curiosity about why Koreans are so obsessed with education was a primary motivation for the book. The novel follows a middle-class Korean family whose lives are shattered by a betrayal and the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Their journey takes them from Seoul to Sydney and finally to Southern California as they try to find their footing again. "Almost a decade ago, I started to write 'American Hagwon' because I wanted to understand why education is so important to Koreans everywhere," Lee said in a sta

Jan 16, 2026By Baek Byung-yeul

'Pachinko' author’s next novel examines Korea’s passion for education

From exchange students to corporate insiders, Smagin twins present new vision of 'Korean Dream'

When Evgenii and Oleg Smagin arrived in Korea as exchange students more than a decade ago, they were struck by the country’s intensity. Everything felt fast and ambitious — a place where effort is visibly translated into progress. For the identical twins from Russia who share a passion for cutting-edge technology, Korea offered both excitement and possibility. That first impression, however, would later deepen into something more demanding — and more transformative. Today, the Smagin twins are the authors of "The Korean Dream," a book gaining attention among both foreign residents and Korean readers. Part memoir and part practical guide, the book traces their shared journey from international students to MBA graduates of KAIST, and eventually to professionals working at major Korean corporations such as SK Telecom and JB Financial Group. More than a success story, it offers a rare insider-outsider perspective on what it actually takes for foreigners to build long-term lives in Korea. “Our story really became the foundation of the book,” the brothers said in a joint interview.

Dec 30, 2025By Alice Hong

From exchange students to corporate insiders, Smagin twins present new vision of 'Korean Dream'

K-LIT REVIEW Juhea Kim’s short story collection reminds us what we hadn’t known we’d forgotten

What would you get if you combined climate fiction with dystopian sci-fi, threw in a dash of feminist and Indigenous literature, then added semi-autobiographical writing to the mix? The answer can be found in “A Love Story From the End of the World” by Juhea Kim, the award-winning author’s first short story collection. The 10 stories in this collection are taken from Kim’s writings over the years. They share no common theme or genre, but span an impressive range that puts the author’s literary versatility on full display. “Biodome” and “Bioark” transport us to a dystopian future; “KwaZulu-Natal,” “Mountain, Island” and the eponymous “A Story From the End of the World” tug at our heartstrings; “Color of the New World” and “Tree of Life” leave us reeling and wanting more; “Older Sister” and “Notting Hill” bear the intriguing scent of autobiography; and “A Woman’s Life, in 10 Scenes” is refreshingly experimental. With this book, Juhea Kim demonstrates once more that she is the master of using external struggles to guide the reader’s gaz

Dec 28, 2025By Faye Leung

[K-LIT REVIEW] Juhea Kim’s short story collection reminds us what we hadn’t known we’d forgotten

K-LIT REVIEW Anton Hur’s debut novel explores the singularity

“Toward Eternity,” the debut novel by Anton Hur, who has built a worldwide reputation as a star Korean-to-English literary translator, borrows heavily from the ideas of technofuturists. They theorize a point — the singularity — at which superintelligent machines tilt things toward a posthuman sci-fi future, and human-machine hybrids start to replace us. Hur’s story begins at the cusp of that revolution. Those who have heard the technofuturist gospel will readily recognize the premise behind the novel. Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist and the real-world chief prophet of technofuturism, predicted superintelligent machines by 2045 in his 2005 magnum opus, “The Singularity is Near.” “[T]he social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound,” Kurzweil wrote, “and the threats they pose considerable.” With these ideas in mind, “Toward Eternity” grapples with an increasingly timely question: How can human meaning survive in a world of superintelligent machines? The first central character in “Toward Eternity” resembles Hur himself: a cosmopolit

Dec 26, 2025By Peter Juhl

[K-LIT REVIEW] Anton Hur’s debut novel explores the singularity

Naver Webtoon creators embrace digital tools to redefine creative boundaries

Naver Webtoon, an online comics affiliate of Naver, has launched a new collaboration with global tech giant Apple that shifts the focus of brand partnerships from popular intellectual properties (IP) to the creators themselves. The company said Sunday that its "Made on iPad" campaign features 10 prominent webtoon artists, including ZHENA of the global hit fantasy comic "Eleceed," and highlights how professional digital tools are integrated into the artists’ creative workflows. The collaboration is seen as a move to focus on how creators actually work, rather than just using characters from their stories. The campaign shows how the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil Pro are used in the actual creative process, focusing on features like drawing performance, portability and work efficiency. Creators involved in the campaign said that using tablets and styluses allows them to work more freely, according to Naver Webtoon. "The campaign is strategically designed to highlight the utility and performance of the hardware within a natural creative workflow, rather than simply displaying a finished result

Dec 21, 2025By Baek Byung-yeul

Naver Webtoon creators embrace digital tools to redefine creative boundaries

InterviewIn wake of 'failed' revolution, Wai Yee Chan stands with young Hongkongers who carried it

For Hongkongers, the year 2014 was an experience without precedent. For 79 days, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets demanding the right to choose their own leaders free from Beijing’s control, all the while shielding themselves from tear gas and pepper spray with umbrellas that would later give the rally its signature name: the Umbrella Movement. “Hong Kong had never been a place of many mass movements. So when it was over and everyone went home, none of us could quite articulate what had exactly happened, or how we felt,” novelist Wai Yee Chan said in an interview with the Korean press Monday, recalling how she had walked those streets herself among the crowd. “The biggest emotion wasn’t PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder); it was helplessness.” But the 2014 movement was far from fruitless. It lit a fuse in Hong Kong’s collective consciousness, something that continued to smolder long after the crowds dispersed. What moved Chan most deeply was the sight of so many young faces, including her own students. “People my age avoided talk of independence because w

Dec 10, 2025By Park Han-sol

In wake of 'failed' revolution, Wai Yee Chan stands with young Hongkongers who carried it

K-LIT REVIEW Bora Chung pivots from sci-fi to ghost stories in 'Midnight Timetable'

The hours after midnight are where emotions — some intense, some that linger for too long — sort themselves out. They mingle with the cold night air and lay resting in shadows and moonlight. Shapes form. You make double-takes. What you thought you saw is actually a manifestation of what you feel, strange and ghostly in the odd hours. This zone of time is when the sinister reveals itself to you. “I read somewhere that no matter how many hours one sleeps in a day, a normal person has to be asleep at some point between 1 and 3 a.m.,” Bora Chung writes in “Midnight Timetable,” her latest book to be translated into English. “They do say the time between 1 and 3 a.m. are when ghost sightings are the most common. Maybe a lack of sleep during those hours makes people see things.” Chung has presented the weird and wonderful through short story collections like “Cursed Bunny” and “Your Utopia,” and she returns to these same charms with “Midnight Timetable,” a series of ghost stories that congeal into the form of a novel. With “Midnight Timetable,” translated by Ant

Dec 6, 2025By Nathan Truong

[K-LIT REVIEW] Bora Chung pivots from sci-fi to ghost stories in 'Midnight Timetable'

When remembering becomes criminal: Goncourt winner Kamel Daoud confronts Algeria's silenced past

“We think that simply because we’ve witnessed something, we can express it. But no. Great pain, great suffering — they impose limits. When you walk through a site of massacre and human flesh sticks to your shoes, what use are grand, weighty words?” Kamel Daoud was 22 when he became a journalist to cover the civil war in his homeland of Algeria. The conflict, which raged between the government and Islamist rebels from 1991 to 2002, claimed as many as 200,000 lives, most of them civilians. Yet the way the state chose to “document” the atrocity was through absolute erasure. In 2006, it passed a law effectively forbidding any attempt to speak about or investigate the events of what has since come to be known as the “Black Decade.” Daoud’s “Houris,” which won French literature prize Prix Goncourt in 2024, summons the very memories of the civil war that his country sought to scrub from its history. Through the voice of Aube, forever scarred as the sole survivor of a massacre that wiped out her entire family, the writer attempts what the state never did: to remember. A tra

Dec 5, 2025By Park Han-sol

When remembering becomes criminal: Goncourt winner Kamel Daoud confronts Algeria's silenced past

LTI Korea honors translators behind Han Kang’s Nobel Prize win

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) honored two veteran translators for their contributions to Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel Prize in literature during its annual Translation Awards ceremony in Seoul, Wednesday. Anders Karlsson and Park Ok-kyoung, who have co-translated Korean literature into Swedish for almost three decades, were the recipients of the Outstanding Service Award. “Their translation work has played a pivotal role in elevating the status of Korean literature in Europe and increasing its international visibility,” said Kwon Seong-soo, a professor at Sookmyung Women's University and head of the jury committee, during the ceremony. “In particular, they directly introduced Korean literature to the Swedish literary community, which oversees the Nobel Prize in literature, and their Swedish translations of Han Kang’s 'We Do Not Part' and 'The White Book' were highly regarded in the judging process for the Nobel Prize.” The couple thanked LTI Korea for the recognition. “When we started, there was no publisher in Sweden willing to publish our translations.

Dec 4, 2025By Kim Se-jeong

LTI Korea honors translators behind Han Kang’s Nobel Prize win

InterviewThink 'can-do' and find way: Blind Wall Street analyst talks about life, resilience

Soonkyu Shin’s life story might at first sound like a classic tale of hardship and heroic triumph — all too easy to flatten into drama. Shin lost his eyesight completely at age 9. At his mother’s urging, he began learning the piano, and by 15, with the help of an American missionary, he left on his own for the United States. Once there, he found himself drawn not to the piano but to the workings of the human mind, studying psychology at Harvard with hopes of becoming a psychiatrist. But that dream died when new medical guidelines required physicians to examine and diagnose patients without any outside assistance — a standard that effectively closed the profession to blind candidates. After a period of searching, he pivoted to the psychology of business as a Ph.D. student at MIT Sloan in management and organizational studies. Before he got his degree, opportunities led him to Wall Street, working at JPMorgan and then Brown Brothers Harriman, where he has been a credit analyst for the past three decades. Shin stresses that his life is distant from the typical narratives often impo

Dec 3, 2025By Park Han-sol

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