Seoul Selection: 53 books

Olympic Boulevard is a full-length novel by Philip Onho Lee that depicts the joys and sorrows of Korean immigrants in the United States. The story centers on a group of Koreans who emigrated in 1981 to build a new life and pursue the American Dream. Drawing on his experiences as a first-generation...

Hangeul, the indigenous writing system of Korea, was promulgated in 1446. It is an ingenious system that utilizes modern and scientific linguistic theories and principles of Korean traditional culture to perfectly express the sounds of the Korean language. Crafted by some of the leading scholars of...

Learning How to Die Can Teach Us How to Live All of the world's religions refer to death in some way. Everyone is somewhat familiar with stories about where we go or what happens to us after death. From an early age, we have all heard stories of heaven or hell or some other version of paradise....

The most well-known Korean ceramics are the celadon of the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392) and the white porcelain of the ensuing Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). [...] The celadons of Goryeo, their grace and color tinged with feminine beauty, symbolized an aristocratic Buddhist culture, while the white porcelains...

Korea’s most widely loved romantic tales : Chunhyang and Sim Cheong There are not many old Korean love tales, but everyone knows the story of Chunhyang. In 1892, the first Korean to visit Paris, Hong Jong-u, helped publish a French version of the story of Chunhyang. Titled “Fragrant...

The poems in this collection are located between a lost world and today’s modernity, poised between celebration and lamentation, as icons of loss and yearning. The reader is carried into unfamiliar spaces of scenery and also of language, as the translators retain echoes of the Korean originals,...

When HONG Sangsoo's debut work, "The Day a Pig Fell into the Well," was released in May 1996, the nation's film critics were thrown into shock. The cinematic language in the film was unprecedented in Korean film history. Since then, HONG has continued to show his own distinctive style with...

This anthology is a compilation of Westerners’ accounts of their visits to Korea, originally published in books or newspapers before the country opened its doors in the late nineteenth century. The opening of Korea made it possible to explore the country in detail and write detailed accounts. Prior...

The modernization of traditional houses in each country may be understood as a process by which various aspects of culture and architecture originating from China, India, European colonial countries and international style were assimilated into various forms and elements of traditional houses. In...

If given ten minutes, how would you manage your mind?   Momentary liberation may be a matter of purifying ourselves of greed or anger by rolling around a single thought when greed and anger arise to harm the purity of our minds. Daily liberation is a matter of setting aside time...

This book is the result of efforts to reach a deeper and broader understanding of the director BONG Joon-ho, who has been the subject of a great deal of popular interest and attention in Korean society in spite of his relatively short filmography of three feature films. [...] After the experience...