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[English]

Readers are welcome to write to me. Corrections, questions about a book discussed here, suggestions for Korean or world literature that deserves an essay, and queries about the blog itself all find their way to the same address.

You may reach me at hemingwaydynamite@outlook.kr.

A word on who reads your message. As explained on the About page, James L. Fleming is the editorial name under which these essays are presented, and every message is read by the human editor behind it, the same person who fact-checks and signs off on each essay. Replies can take a few days, and not every suggestion can become an essay, but each one is read.

If you have found a factual error, please name the essay and quote the passage in question. I would rather be corrected than remain wrong in silence.

Your email address and message are kept solely to answer your enquiry, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

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

[한글 번역]

독자의 편지는 언제든 환영한다. 정오표 제보, 이곳에서 다룬 책에 대한 질문, 에세이로 읽고 싶은 한국 문학이나 세계 문학의 추천, 블로그 자체에 대한 문의까지 모두 같은 주소로 받는다.

연락은 hemingwaydynamite@outlook.kr 로 주기 바란다.

누가 메시지를 읽는지도 밝혀 둔다. About 페이지에 적었듯 제임스 L. 플레밍은 이 에세이들을 소개하는 편집상의 이름이며, 모든 메시지는 그 뒤에 있는 사람인 편집자가 읽는다. 각 에세이의 사실관계를 검증하고 최종 승인하는 바로 그 사람이다. 답장에는 며칠이 걸릴 수 있고 모든 제안이 에세이가 될 수는 없지만, 모든 메시지는 읽는다.

사실관계의 오류를 발견했다면 에세이 제목과 해당 문장을 알려 주기 바란다. 잘못을 안은 채 침묵하느니 지적을 받는 편이 낫다.

보내온 이메일 주소와 메시지는 개인정보 처리방침에 밝힌 대로 문의에 답하는 목적으로만 보관한다.

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

Translating Yeong-hye: Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Its Three Witnesses

The first sentence of Han Kang's The Vegetarian belongs to a husband, and in Korean it is little more than a shrug. Before his wife stopped eating meat, he says, he had never thought of her as anyone special. In Deborah Smith's English the same man remembers her as "completely unremarkable in every way", which is a harder thing to say about the person you chose to marry. I have read the two openings side by side more often than I would care to admit, and the gap between them has occupied me for years. It is not a large gap. It is the width of an adverb or two. Yet the novel is about nothing so much as the distance between what a woman is and what the people around her say she is, and on the very first page the English edition has already widened it by a notch. That English edition has had an extraordinary life. It shared the Man Booker International Prize with its author in 2016, the first year the award went to a single book and was divided equally between writer ...

The Uncrowned King: Keigo Higashino (1958–2026) and the Readers Who Crowned Him

The figures arrived on 29 July, in the level prose of a bookseller's press release. Kyobo Book Centre, the largest bookshop chain in Korea, had gone back through ten years of fiction sales, from the summer of 2016 to the last week of July 2026, and ranked every novelist on its shelves. Han Kang came first, which surprised nobody who has followed Korean letters since Stockholm. Second, by a narrow margin and comfortably ahead of every other foreign writer, was Keigo Higashino, a former automotive engineer from Osaka who had died six days earlier. I have written about Han Kang on this blog before, and the pairing at the top of that list struck me as a small puzzle worth sitting with. One is a Nobel laureate whose novels read like bruises. The other wrote paperbacks that commuters finish on the train and pass on to their sisters. And yet Korean readers, voting with their wallets for a decade, placed the two side by side. My suspicion, which this essay sets out to test, is that they...

Park Kyong-ni's Toji at 100: The Grief She Kept From Print

A small item in the Korean arts pages caught me somewhat off guard three weeks ago: a photograph of forty-seven poems, none of them published in the author's lifetime, gathered at last into a slim volume called Sanda-neun Seulpeum , roughly The Grief of Being Alive . The author was Park Kyong-ni, and the poems had sat for years in the archive of the Toji Cultural Foundation, kept back, according to her grandson and the foundation's current chairman Kim Se-hee, because they were judged too honest, too nakedly personal, to release while anyone who might recognise themselves in them was still living. I have spent the better part of twenty years with Park's fiction, and I had never once thought of her as a poet who withheld anything. The woman who wrote Toji , after all, withheld nothing. She simply built a five-part, sixteen-volume cathedral around what she could not say plainly, and dared the reader to find the grief inside it. Reading about the new volume, I found myself won...

James L. Fleming: Essays on Korean & World Literature

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