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Book Reviewed by:A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul.
Love in the Big City is the English-language debut of Sang Young Park, one of Korea's most exciting young writers. A runaway bestseller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores, went into nine printings, and was praised for its unique literary voice and perspective. It is now poised to capture a worldwide readership.
Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.
A brilliantly written novel that takes us into the glittering nighttime of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning after with both humor and emotion, Love in the Big City is a wry portrait of millennial loneliness as well as the abundant joys of queer life.
Each chapter is centered on a person or relationship significant to Young, but they cohere to form a fuller picture of the life of the novel's sardonic, flirtatious, fun-loving protagonist. Told with equal parts pathos and humor, Love in the Big City is a tender examination of young queer life in South Korea's most dynamic city. The characterization and the narrative voice are so distinct and nuanced that Young feels like an old friend by the end of the novel; someone you feel that you know on an intimate level, in spite of having only spent a little over 200 pages with him...continued
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(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
From Parasite to BTS to Squid Game, there's no shortage of brilliant Korean media and entertainment that has had international reach lately. Books are no exception, with Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City, translated into English by Anton Hur, being just one example. Here is a sampling of some other exciting novels that have been translated from Korean into English in recent years.
The Vegetarian, Human Acts and The White Book by Han Kang, all translated by Deborah Smith. One of the most notable South Korean novels of recent years is The Vegetarian, which got the attention of English-language readers when it won the International Booker in 2016. Two additional books by Han Kang, Human Acts and The White Book, were ...
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If you liked Love in the Big City, try these:
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Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best
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Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Sang Young Park is my new favorite writer, as in his work we see life in modern Korea in what I think of as a fuller way, due to the inclusion of queer lives there. This novel is bawdy, hilarious, heartbreaking, fearless.
