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About....

About....


  I am James L. Fleming — Edinburgh-born and Edinburgh-bound, in the way that only a Scotsman fully understands. I hold a B.A. and M.A. in Asian Cultural History from the University of Edinburgh, and began, though never finished, a doctorate in the same field; family circumstances and my own health intervened, and I have since made a kind of quiet peace with that unfinished chapter.

  These days I live a modest, semi-reclusive life on the outskirts of my native city, dividing my time between reading, writing, and the occasional glass of something Scottish. My particular devotion is to Korean literature — a passion that began during my university years and has only deepened with time — though I range freely across world literature more broadly, from the Russian canon of my youth to the American classics I once famously misquoted in front of a girl I was trying to impress.

  This blog exists as a space for long-form essays on the books that have shaped me, written always through the lens of a Western reader who has spent a working lifetime studying Asian literary and cultural traditions. I am not a professional critic, and I claim no final authority on any of the books I discuss — only an abiding curiosity, and a willingness to be wrong in interesting ways. This space also serves, modestly, as a place for readers studying British English to encounter it as it is actually written and thought, rather than as a textbook renders it.

  A note, for the curious: James L. Fleming is the name I write under. The reading behind these essays, and the opinions in them, are genuinely mine.


  For correspondence, you may reach me at hemingwaydynamite@outlook.kr.


Ex Oriente, Lux.
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh

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