Musings
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National Adoption Month and All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
“Every child deserves to grow up with a safe and loving family, with the care and support of their community. During National Adoption Month, we celebrate all of the children and families nurtured, enriched, and made whole by adoption and recommit ourselves to ensuring that every child in America can grow up in a loving and…
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Human Acts by Han Kang
Please be aware that there is a content warning for graphic violence, death, and trauma from real historical events. Human Acts is part historical account of the Gwangju Uprising and part lucid dream of grief and trauma. Han Kang muses about the cruelty human beings are capable of, and wonders if this brutality is fundamentally…
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If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
“Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us. Until that year, we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.” Summary If We Were Villains is an updated take on dark academia conventions, placing our characters in a prestigious acting…
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Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon
This is a book about Texas. It’s also about boysenberries, yogis, cats in space, Hemingway, cowboy churches, Marx, and more. It’s about all of these things and none of these things. From the lens of a Korean visiting Texas on a writer’s residency, he chronicles all of the hyper-Americana that the state has to offer…
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To The Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-Young
One hundred thousand Koreans dead in a single day. The next day five hundred thousand—all dead from a strange virus, rapidly mutating with every vaccine. Rumors begin to circulate that eating the livers of little girls will cure the disease. To protect her remaining family, Dori flees with her younger sister to the barren expanse…
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Saturn and Their Rings by S. N. Benenhaley
Nymeria Publishing sent me an ARC of this poetry collection in exchange for an honest review. “I am Saturn, a planet of diamond rainstorms, Mega blizzards, and hexagonal hurricanes. I will have to find my own light by my own means.” Talk about some atmospheric poetry! This collection features stellar illustrations and poems from the…
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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
The assertive honesty of Sally Rooney’s characters is understandably divisive amongst readers because the characters in Beautiful World, Where Are You are about as likable as your own university friends. That is to say they’re completely ordinary people who make questionable dating decisions, are self-interested, and at times intolerable—but some reason or another connect with…
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The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun
This review was originally submitted as part of the Korean Literature Review Contest with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea and was titled: How Bureaucracy and Capitalism Contribute to Cataclysmic Complacency: a review of The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun because we like to have fun here. “Disaster and catastrophe aren’t just within the realm…
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