The Queens of K-town

Twenty-six-year-old Cora Moon comes back to Manhattan s Koreatown after an absence of ten years. The vision of a girl standing on the edge of a building hurtles Cora back into memory to her first summer in K-town, where along with her new friends, she got lost in the maze of nightclubs and room salons, mini-marts and private dining rooms behind rice-paper doors. The novel alternates between two worlds, as she relives her past and drifts through her present, in which she begins an affair with a stranger she calls The Monk. They play psychiatrist in his living room, but Cora seeks understanding of herself through a crash course in theoretical physics. What seems to be a coming-of-age-story veers off into the higher dimensions and the shady underworld, featuring shamans and shopkeepers, misfits and exiles. From the prologue, we know that ten years ago, a girl leapt to her death. We know nothing else except that she was Cora s first love. The rooftop girl in the present is a stranger, which makes it convenient for Cora to assume her identity and follow in her footsteps. A double-stranded narrative, the novel gradually unravels two mysteries: Who was the first girl who jumped? And what will happen when Cora finally reaches the top?

The Queens of K-Town

Literature & Fiction

Hur, Angela Mi Young

United States

MACADAM/CAGE.

<div>Elsa Park is a physicist at the top of her game, stationed at an international observatory in Antarctica thousands of miles from ghosts that have haunted her family her entire life. But even the South Pole can't prevent her childhood imaginary friend from finding her. The reappearance of this ghostly apparition signals that the curse her mother told her afflicted the women of their line - who were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean folklore, and whose story Elsa has tried desperately to outrun - is finally catching up to her. Elsa can't get rid of the ghost girl who leads her, White Rabbit-like, to a Stockholm professor of Korean poetry. Even more disconcerting, she learns that her mother, who went mute and catatonic after a mysterious accident in Elsa's adolescence, has suddenly spoken for the first time in decades, muttering about "the other girl."&nbsp; When tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to the childhood home and cultural lore she rejected in favour of ambition and hard science. There, she grapples with a splintered family as she seeks long-elusive answers in the handwritten pages of her mother's dark folktales. Meanwhile, the fate Elsa spent her adult life running from looms ever closer. Just how tightly bound is she to the stories that cursed her ancestors? What more do we pass on - as individuals, as women, as immigrants far from home - besides our stories?</div>

Folklorn

Erewhon

Erewhon Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hur, Angela Mi Young. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hur, Angela Mi Young