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Prize for Fiction is awarded each year to a fiction that explores American life. The 2013 winner, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), may at first sight seem an unlikely candidate because the novel is set mainly in North Korea, where the orphan protagonist Jun Do grows up in an orphanage called Long Tomorrows. Because he is an orphan, he suffers hardship and hunger, is scorned by and excluded from society, yet his expendability makes him useful to the regime. In his teens, Jun Do is trained as a tunnel soldier, and as an adult he becomes a Taekwondo expert
serious dilemmas, notably ‘Korea’, where a young man considers emigration to America. The basic plot is the attempt by a father to enlist his son in the United States military. The father presents this as an opportunity to escape Ireland, having served himself in the War of Independence. He is haunted by his memory of an execution, and the opening paragraphs of the story owe much again to O’Malley and to Joyce. The son is reticent and then determined after he hears his father discuss the money a neighbour received after his own son was killed in Korea. The translation
beautifully lyrical lament: the witness is also the victim. And he has invited ‘her’ into his irresolvable paradox of belonging and exclusion. On Kim Seung-Hee’s Hope Is Lonely 21 “Hope does not grow straight …” ( ‘ Inside of Hope is God’s Water Drop’) Kim Seung-Hee’s poetry sees traditional Korean forms responding to European, and later American, modernism by opening up to create liberated space, with the tensions between the external image
wanted to do was … write a global novel’. 36 One could be forgiven for thinking that Kingston’s interest lies in war, since her writing makes such frequent references to wars that have occurred in different points in history. A brief tally finds references to the Chinese–British Opium War, the Chinese–Japanese War of 1894–95, the Korean War, World War II and of course the Vietnam War. In reality, this simply reflects her desire to explore all possible avenues of peaceful activism in relation to a whole range of political themes, of which war, racism, gender inequality
was originally published in 1987 by Meadow Press as a small hand-set run of 150 copies, crafted of paper from the Kozo rice fields in Korea, together with original woodblock prints by the Taoist teacher and son of the well-known Chinese American author Jade Snow Wong, Deng Ming-Dao, and which sold for $400–$500 each (‘Preface’, HOS , pp. xv–xvi). Originally, many of the prose pieces were written for Kingston’s ‘Hers’ column which was published in the New York Times , as diary entries, where Kingston had decided to ‘write personally, about myself’. 3 As Hawai
Oceania, suitably renamed as Airstrip One. War between the three great power blocs of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia is incessant in Orwell’s novel, though for the most part remote from the metropolitan centres. The Korean war of 1950–53 was very much the kind of conflict he had envisaged. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a story not just of ideological tyranny but of national humiliation and defeat. Historical memory has been crushed, and the familiar English language is being systematically eradicated. The currency of Airstrip One is no longer the pound sterling but the dollar
strong sense of ‘foreignness’ as he wanders through the streets of Dublin. In O’Loughlin’s clean, well-crafted poetry, Norgelis narrates with sarcastic perceptiveness his ‘Joycean Pilgrimage’ throughout a multicultural city of ‘Lithuanian cars’, and ‘Korean’ and ‘Chinese restaurants’ (28, 53). In such a shifting landscape, the ability lies, as Norgelis suggests, in opening one’s mind, in order to truly learn from the Other, creating a new atmosphere where hybridity between cultures is greatly encouraged. O’Loughlin records Norgelis’s marvel at his discovery of iconic
before, just after Robbie Keane had actually scored that goal and Ray had hugged and kissed maybe fifteen people in the pub, and he’d found himself in the arms of a big lad from Poland. And he’s wondered. Why was this guy hugging Ray? Kissing his forehead. Punching the air. Throwing his head back and singing: – YOU’LL NEVER BEAT THE EYE-RISH YOU’LL NEVER BEAT THE EYE-RISH – Why? Because his own team was shite? (Poland had been beaten the day before, by South Korea). Because he’d been in Ireland a while and felt that he was one of the gang? Because he wanted to feel
Brown and others during the conflict [between anti-slavery and proslavery factions] in Kansas … A more typical feature of the settlement was a little college, no longer in existence, which educated women as well as men. Some of these women travelled to distant countries, Korea, for example, to establish women’s education there. History has ebbed away from Tabor since then, but it would be difficult to underestimate the impact of this one little settlement on American culture and world culture.66 Gilead is not, then, just one of a ‘hundred little towns’ but a singular
Godot, p. 4. 29 Martin Esslin. ‘Waiting for Godot: Western and Korean.’ The Samuel Beckett On-Line Resources and Links Pages. 1988, p. 2. 30 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 54–55. 31 Kenner, A Reader’s Guide, p. 34. 32 Barbara Reich Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (London: Associated University Press, 1979). 33 Michael Worton, ‘Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as Text.’ The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 34 Taylor-Batty and Taylor-Batty, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, p