From one of Korea's literary stars, a novel about two orphans from the streets of Seoul: one becomes the head of a powerful motorcycle gang, and the other follows him at all costsIn South Korea, underground motorcycle gangs attract society's castoffs. They form groups of hundreds and speed wildly through cities at night. For Jae and Dongyu, two orphans, their motorcycles are a way of survival.Jae is born in a bathroom stall at the Seoul Express Bus Terminal. ...

**"Lee takes us into urgent and emotional novelistic terrain: the desperate and tenuous realms defectors are forced to inhabit after escaping North Korea.” –Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son"The more confusing and horrible our world becomes, the more critical the role of fiction in communicating both the facts and the meaning of other people’s lives. Krys Lee joins writers like Anthony Marra, Khaled Hosseini and Elnathan John in this urgent work." –San Fr...

An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction.Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacr...

Food can bring together families, communities, and cultures. It is the essence of life and yet our relationships with one another can be most fraught at the dinner table. This perpetually fascinating subject has inspired a unique collection of fiction—including flash fiction, essay, short stories, and even a "stoku" (amalgam of short story and haiku)—from a wonderfully diverse and international group of authors.The authors in the anthology include Elaine Chiew, Chitra Banarjee Diva...

Featuring: LUCY CALDWELL, JULIAN GOUGH, M.J. HYLAND, KRYS LEE, DEBORAH LEVY, MIROSLAV PENKOV (WINNER), HENRIETTA ROSE-INNES (RUNNER UP), ADAM ROSS, CARRIE TIFFANY, CHRIS WOMERSLEY"I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter," quipped Blaise Pascal famously, "I didn’t have time to write you a short one."Brevity may be the soul of wit, but as Clive Anderson argues in his introduction to this collection, it is also, very often, the hard-won soul of great literatu...

Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi has had to fend for herself since childhood, most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Danny is a Chinese-American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when each of them travels to the region where China borders North Korea-Danny, to visit his mother, ...

In South Korea, underground motorcycle gangs attract society's castoffs. They form groups of hundreds and speed wildly through cities at night. For Jae and Dongyu, two orphans, their motorcycles are a way of survival.Jae is born in a bathroom stall at the Seoul Express Bus Terminal. And Dongyu is born mute—unable to communicate with anyone except Jae. Both boys grow up on the streets of Seoul among runaway teenagers, con men, prostitutes, religious fanatics, and thieves. After year...

It's been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?Diary of a Murderer captivates and provokes in equal measure, exploring what it means to be on the edge—between life and death, good and evil. In the titular novella, a former serial killer suffering from memory loss sets his sights on one final target: his daughter's boyfriend, who he suspects is also a serial killer. In other stories we witness an affair between two chil...

Exploring grief, yet neither bleak nor overwrought, this powerful short story won the 2013 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition. The judge, Carl Nixon, commended its 'seemingly effortless artistry' and its skilful and well-sustained handling of demanding narrative techniques: 'the author does not miss a beat', he said. Cleverly juxtaposing the past and present, the narrator draws the reader into her life. The judge concluded: 'Beautifully controlled use of simile and ...

These outstanding stories from the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize will provoke, stimulate, move, amuse, unsettle, and entertain

A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora ñ here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances ñ the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.

From the USA Today bestselling author of SARA’S GAME and SARA’S PAST comes the final installment of the Sara Winthrop series, another fast-paced thriller where no one is safe and evil plays by its own rules.Bolstered by a newfound fortune, Sara Winthrop is finally able to escape the horrific nature of her past. She’s moved her family three thousand miles, from the bustling city of Portland to the rolling Appalachians of southwest Virginia. Life is calm, the children are thriving, a...