The Korea Society welcomes beloved Korean author Young-ha Kim as we celebrate the publication of his fourth novel, Your Republic Is Calling You, in English translation. Kim has participated in the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, won all three of the prestigious Korean literary prizes in a single year (2004), has had major motion pictures based on his work, and is one of the first modern Korean writers to be translated by a major American publishing house.

Emotionally taut and psychologically astute, Your Republic Is Calling You reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the ways in which people sometimes never really know the ones they love. An aficionado of Heineken, soccer, and sushi, family man Gi-yeong is also a North Korean spy who has been living among his enemies for twenty-one years. Suddenly, he receives a mysterious email—a possible directive from the home office to come in from the cold.

Spanning the course of one day, the novel confronts moral questions on the small and large scale, and addresses the political and cultural transformations that have shaped Korea since the 1980s.

Tuesday, October 12
6:30PM Reading and Reception

Young-ha Kim is the author of Your Republic is Calling You and the award-winning I Have The Right to Destroy Myself, which was highly acclaimed upon publication in the United States. He has earned a reputation as one of the most talented and prolific Korean writers of his generation, publishing five novels and three collections, one of which was a Border’s Original Voice pick. He is a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University.