A ground-breaking retrospective of this major Korean writer of the modernist era, presented in English by award-winning poets and translators.

Winner of the Big Other Award in Translation
Winner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work

Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

The three stories in this collection are brilliant; painfully dark jewels from an author without much optimism about anything, but with a keen eye for absurdity.

-Charles Montgomery, Korean Literature in Translation