Category: Arts & Culture

A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus.

Author photo by S. M. Sukardi

One of “22 Works of Fiction to Read This Spring”—The New York Times

A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus. Sea Change is an “absolutely stunning debut” novel —Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face—by Gina Chung.

Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at a mall aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (Mountain Dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeno). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro’s only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager. When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro has one last chance to come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world.

In a conversation with Frances Cha, Gina Chung talks about her debut novel.

Sea Change will be available for sale during the event.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Author:

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Catapult, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, F(r)iction, and Wigleaf, among others, and has been recognized by several contests, including the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, the Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest.

About the Moderator:

Frances Cha is the author of the novel If I Had Your Face (Ballantine, 2020), which was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Time Magazine, NPR and BBC among other publications, and is being translated into 11 languages. She is from Korea and worked as a culture editor for CNN in Seoul and Hong Kong. She has taught creative writing at Yonsei University and media studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul and currently teaches undergraduate fiction workshop at Columbia University. Her children’s book The Goblin Twins, set in Korea and New York, is forthcoming from Crown in September, 2023.

Join us for an in-person event with award-winning author, Patricia Park, for the release of her debut YA novel, Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim

Alejandra Verónica Kim doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. At her wealthy Manhattan high school, her super Spanish name and super Korean face do not compute to her mostly white classmates and teachers. In her Jackson Heights neighborhood, she’s not Latinx enough. Even at home, Ale feels unwelcome. And things at home have only gotten worse since Papi’s body was discovered on the subway tracks. Ale wants nothing more than to escape the city for the wide-open spaces of the prestigious Wyder University. But when a microaggression at school thrusts Ale into the spotlight—and into a discussion she didn’t ask for—Ale must discover what it means to carve out a space for yourself to belong. Patricia Park’s coming-of-age novel about a multicultural teen caught between worlds, and the future she is building for herself, is an incisive, laugh-out-loud, provocative read.

Join us for an in-person event with award-winning author, Patricia Park, for the release of her debut YA novel, Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

This event is co-presented by  The Korea Society, and the Strand.

About the Author:

Patricia Park is an assistant professor of creative writing at American University, a Fulbright Scholar in Creative Arts, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and the author of the acclaimed adult novel Re Jane. The Korean American reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review; a Best Book of 2015 by the American Library Association; an O, The Oprah Magazine pick; and an NPR “Fresh Air” pick, among other honors. Her writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Salon, and others. Patricia lives in Brooklyn, NY.

SKULL WATER is the story of Insu, the son of a Korean mother and a GI father in the U.S. Army, and the intertwined tale of his Korean Big Uncle

“The novel in your hands is something I never knew I’d see, born from things at least two governments hoped to hide. A mixed German Korean boy in 1970s Korea undertakes a quest to save the living with what the dead might know, and he tells us stories across time of this almost-vanished world, and the lives of those thrown away by Korean society and American military forces—his family. Precious, life-altering, rebellious, funny, and full of a necessary truth.” — Alexander Chee

Twenty-five years in the making, Heinz Insu Fenkl‘s ambitious, darkly funny, sweeping novel SKULL WATER is a haunting inter-generational coming-of-age story that grapples with identity and displacement in South Korea in the 1950s and 1970s, and reveals a history both countries would prefer to conceal. Born in South Korea to a German father and a Korean mother, Fenkl grew up in Korea, Germany, and the U.S., and his own experience informs this deeply autobiographical novel.

SKULL WATER is the story of Insu, the son of a Korean mother and a GI father in the U.S. Army, and the intertwined tale of his Korean Big Uncle, who has been exiled to a mountain cave near the family village to die from a gangrenous foot. Growing up near the army base in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Insu and his two best friends, also “half and halfs,” spend their days skipping school, selling scavenged Western goods on the black market, and testing the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. When Insu hears an old legend that water collected from a dead person’s skull will cure any sickness, he vows to collect some to heal Big Uncle’s mysterious injury. His quest takes him and his friends on a sprawling journey into some of South Korea’s darkest corners. Meanwhile, Big Uncle, a geomancer uprooted by the Korean War, has embraced his solitude and fate and attempts to teach his nephew that life is not limited to what we can see or think we know.

In his interview with The New Yorker, Fenkl said; “It’s a Korean folk belief that stories are meant to be told, and that if one keeps them to oneself and hoards them, there will be terrible consequences.”

Join us for a conversation with Heinz Insu Fenkl about his latest book.

The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017

About the Author:

Born in South Korea to a German father and a Korean mother, Heinz Insu Fenkl grew up in Korea until he was twelve, and then in Germany and the U.S. A professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, he teaches creative writing, Asian and Asian American literature, and film. He’s the author of the novel Memories of My Ghost Brother, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. He is also known internationally for his collection of Korean folktales and translations of classic Buddhist texts. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter. heinzinsufenkl.com