Most Popular
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Yoon sorry for shortcomings but insists policies were right
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S. Korea ‘strongly’ protests Japan’s claim over Dokdo in diplomatic bluebook
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US 'incredibly concerned' about suspected NK-Iran military ties
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1 in 3 Koreans live alone, family types becoming diverse
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Korean won weakens amid heightened uncertainty
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Seoul says will cut power to porn festival planned on Han River
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Sewol victims commemorated on tragedy's 10th anniversary
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Korea, Japan finance chiefs vow to tame rampant FX market volatility
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Chanel, Louis Vuitton see muted growth in Korea
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Conservative bloc divided over Han’s role in election defeat
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Writers share Wodehouse comic fiction prize, win a pig
LONDON (AP) -- Satires set in financial-crisis Ireland and the high-end art world share this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, whose rewards include a bottle of champagne and a pig. Paul Murray’s “The Mark of the Void” and Hannah Rothschild’s “The Improbability of Love” were named the award’s first joint winners on Wednesday. The authors won’t have to split the porcine prize for the award, named in honor of comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse. Murray and Rothschild will each
May 25, 2016
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Helen Mirren to narrate audiobook for Beatrix Potter story
NEW YORK (AP) -- Helen Mirren’s latest role is audio only. The award-winning British actress is narrating the recently rediscovered Beatrix Potter story “The Tale of Kitty-In-Boots,” Penguin Random House told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The hardcover and audio editions are scheduled for a Sept. 6 release. Actress Helen Mirren poses for photographers upon arrival at the screening of the film “La Fille Inconnue (The Unkown Girl)” at the 69th international film festival, Cannes, France, May 18
May 25, 2016
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Oil riches help keep alive bedouin poetry
ABU DHABI (AFP) -- The Middle East’s poetry equivalent of “Pop Idol” is helping to keep alive an age-old tradition using bedouin dialect, which is barely understood outside the Arabian Gulf. Apart from the glory, a Kuwaiti student took home five million dirhams ($1.4 million), the top prize in a television show followed by millions of poetry lovers across the region. With his Nabati poem, Rajih al-Hamidani was crowned 2016 champion of “Million’s Poet,” staged in oil-rich Abu Dhabi for a seventh
May 25, 2016
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With Booker win behind her, Han expands realm of expression
Novelist Han Kang is receiving a level of media attention that few in the literary profession have experienced. Fellow writers and critics welcome the international breakthrough for Korean literature that her Man Booker International Award win is anticipated to bring. Local papers are analyzing her award-winning novel, “The Vegetarian,” first published in 2007, sentence by sentence. There is even newfound interest in the field of literary translation. Amid the frenzy, however, what Han wants to
May 25, 2016
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World War II's endgame was also a beginning for Samuel Beckett
“A Country Road, A Tree: A Novel” By Jo Baker Knopf (304 pages, $26.95) When war came to Europe in 1939, Samuel Beckett was a published but largely unknown and unread Irish writer working in the long shadow of James Joyce, for whom he’d served as a literary secretary in Paris while the great man was writing “Finnegans Wake.” By war’s end six years later, Beckett was well on his way to becoming the markedly different writer who would shortly unveil “Waiting for Godot” and who is now justly rememb
May 25, 2016
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‘The Gene’ captures scientific method in all its fumbling glory
“The Gene: An Intimate History” By Siddhartha Mukherjee Scribner (592 pages, $30) “Like Pythagoras’s triangle, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Pyramids in Giza, like the image of a fragile blue planet seen from outer space, the double helix of DNA is an iconic image, etched permanently into human history and memory,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in “The Gene: An Intimate History,” a fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making
May 25, 2016
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Lara Feigel’s book tours Germany in the wake of WWII defeat
“The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich” By Lara Feigel Bloomsbury (443 pages, $32) It wasn’t just grunts and generals who crossed into Germany at the end of the Second World War. Along with Allied forces, a who’s who of writers, journalists, poets and filmmakers came to observe, report and reconstruct a shattered world. What they saw shocked and bewildered them. Major cities -- Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne -- had been heavily bombed. The plight of ordina
May 25, 2016
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Man Booker Prize pushes sales of 'The Vegetarian' overseas
Sales of Man Booker International Prize winner "The Vegetarian" by Korean novelist Han Kang have soared overseas, a Korean literary agency said Wednesday.Joseph Lee, president of Korean Literary (KL) Management, told Yonhap News Agency that the book has gone into a second printing of20,000 copies in the United Kingdom and 7,500 copies in the United States. KL Management handles the author's publication rights in foreign markets.He also said many countries, including India, Indonesia and some Ara
May 19, 2016
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Efforts that culminated in Han's Booker win
While novelist Han Kang’s Man Booker International Prize will likely be a much-desired boost for Korean literature’s push into the international stage, there has been a prolonged, if niche, interest in Korean literature from global audiences long before her novel “The Vegetarian” came into the spotlight. In fact, Korean literature has enjoyed sporadic success overseas, which may have culminated in Han’s win. In Germany, for example, Jeong Yu-jeong’s “Seven Years of Darkness” ranked in the Top 1
May 18, 2016
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J.K. Rowling honored by PEN for literary and humanitarian work
NEW YORK (AP) -- J.K. Rowling's passion for free expression is so strong it extends to someone she’d otherwise not care to discuss: Donald Trump. Speaking Monday night before hundreds gathered for PEN America's annual gala at the American Museum of Natural History, the “Harry Potter” creator noted that she opposed a recent petition calling for banning the presumptive Republican presidential nominee from entering the United Kingdom, saying such actions endanger everyone’s rights. “I find almost e
May 18, 2016
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Chilean-American writer Allende seeks inspiration after loss
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- Isabel Allende begins writing all her books on Jan. 8. But when the day arrived this year, she struggled with writer's block. The practice began out of superstition. She started writing her first book, “The House of the Spirits,” on this date and it became an international best-seller. She then kept it as a discipline. But it was a strange year (she doesn’t want to call it a bad one). A year away from writing after great losses: her publicist, two friends, even h
May 18, 2016
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Garcia Marquez’s ashes arrive in Colombia ahead of tribute
BOGOTA (AFP) -- The ashes of Latin American literary great Gabriel Garcia Marquez have arrived in his native Colombia ahead of a Sunday ceremony at their final resting place, his son told Agence France-Presse. The Nobel-winning author of the groundbreaking epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” died in Mexico City in April 2014, at the age of 87. “The ashes are in Colombia,” Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, one of Marquez’s two sons, told AFP on Tuesday. The ceremony will be at the historic La Merced Clois
May 18, 2016
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Julian Barnes portrays troubled composer Shostakovich
“The Noise of Time: A Novel” By Julian Barnes Knopf (224 pages, $25.95) In Julian Barnes’ novel “The Noise of Time,” Dmitri Shostakovich considers the two types of composers in the Soviet Union: dead ones and frightened ones. Call Shostakovich one of the frightened ones. His music is played around the world, but he also stands by the elevator in his fifth-floor apartment many nights, a valise packed with his favorite cigarettes, in case he is arrested by the NKVD for such nonsensical ideologica
May 18, 2016
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Desperation, sublimation and loss seasoned with irony, humor
“LaRose” By Louise Erdrich Harper (384 pages, $27.99) Romeo Puyat, antihero and scourge of Louise Erdrich’s new novel “LaRose,” is a cursed man. Addicted to prescription drugs and anything else he can get his hands on, he lives in the shadows. Decades of ridicule and abuse run through his veins and fuel the rage that drives this story to its stunning end. But once the scores have played out, Romeo stumbles into a moment of brief eloquence, a notable concession and measure of the affection that
May 18, 2016
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Han Kang wins Booker award
Korean author Han Kang became the first Korean to win the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for her novel “The Vegetarian” on Monday. British translator Deborah Smith, who translated the novel from Korean to English, was jointly awarded the prize. “I wanted to depict a woman who refuses to exercise violence,” Han, 45, said in her acceptance speech at the award ceremony held at London‘s Victoria and Albert Museum on Monday night. 2016 Man Booker International prize for fiction winner Ha
May 17, 2016
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Children’s book on Korean history published in English
“Letters from Korean History” is an English-language series of books written for primary to high school students who are interested in learning about Korean history, according to its publisher Cum Libro. The books, published last week, are “for young readers overseas who are curious about Korea and its people, and for young Korean readers keen to learn more about their own history while improving their language skills as global citizens,” said author Park Eun-bong, who has a master’s degree in
May 11, 2016
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Matt Haig offers people with depression ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’
“Reasons to Stay Alive” By Matt Haig Penguin (272 pages, $15) Matt Haig suffered months of depression and anxiety so crippling that he stood on the edge of a cliff, trying to summon the wherewithal to throw himself off. “The weird thing about depression,” Haig writes in “Reasons to Stay Alive,” is “the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased.” Somehow, Haig inched his way back from that cliff. Over time, with love and support from his w
May 11, 2016
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‘The Girl from Home’ is a solid economic thriller
“The Girl from Home” By Adam Mitzner Gallery (336 pages, $26) The recent economic downturn -- and financial scandals -- have also ushered in a new wave of economic thrillers in which hedge funds and stock trading provide a background for more dastardly deeds. Adam Mitzner wisely uses this background as a start to explore the maturation of a selfish, vain man who eventually understands what matters more than money or a flashy car in “The Girl from Home.” Hedge fund manager Jonathan Caine is one
May 11, 2016
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Africa's contradictions encountered in a 9-month walk along the Nile
“Walking the Nile” By Levison Wood Atlantic Monthly Press (338 pages, $26) In becoming the first person to walk the Nile River’s length of more than 6,500 kilometers, explorer and ex-British soldier Levison Wood does more than cross footsteps with noted Victorian predecessors such as David Livingstone and Richard Burton. He also traces a nine-month journey through the contradictions of African life -- cacophonous cities and expanses of barely trod landscapes offset by the greed and corruption o
May 11, 2016
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‘Paul McCartney: The Life’ offers thorough account of ex-Beatle
“Paul McCartney: The Life” By Philip Norman Little, Brown (853 pages, $32) Behind the double thumbs-up, impish smile and round, half-moon eyes lies a Paul McCartney more complex than public perception lends itself to. As biographer Philip Norman writes in “Paul McCartney: The Life,” McCartney is more than just the “cute Beatle” thumping away on a left-handed violin-shaped bass or the elder statesman of rock who continues to sell out stadium concerts lasting more than three hours. McCartney is,
May 11, 2016