What Makes a City

"Seong-won Park was born in Daegu in 1969. He made his literary debut with a short story called “A Will”, which was published in Literature and Society (Munhak gwa Sahwoe) in 1994. His first book of short stories, Disorder, Yi Sang, Ideal, was published in 1996, and Steal Me, his second collection, came out in 2000. In 2003, he was honored with the award for “Young Artists of Today” in literature, and he published his third book of short stories, We Are Running, in 2005. What Is It That Makes Up a City? is Park’s fourth collection, published in 2009. His fifth and most recent collection, In the Course of a Day, was published in 2012.""Chang Chung Hwa has been engaged in literary translation since 2007. Her first published work, Su-ah Bae’s story, “Time in Gray”, was released by Asia Publishers in 2013, and she was honored in that same year by Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, held by The Korea Times, for her translation of Seong-won Park’s story “By Motor-Home to Ulan Bator”.Since 2007, Andrew Keast has been working with Chang Chung Hwa on the translation of Korean literature. His efforts were recognized in 2013 by the Modern Literature Translation Awards, held by The Korea Times, and the same year saw Asia Publishers’ release of his first published work."

“How strange these stories are, and what surprising merits they hold! Consider, for example, “By Motor-Home to Ulan Bator”. This is such an exciting story that one can not but read the whole piece, without interruption. There’s also “What Is It That Makes a City?”, read and finished so quickly that one feels one has been somehow possessed. And as an after-taste, there remains a sense of something like loneliness and something like alienation. One is aware of the connections between these stories, and yet each is quite independent. The stories may strike one as sarcastic, but they are also very warm and even bright, and composed with meticulous care. While these characters talk about the past, they seem to inhabit a future to which we have not yet been. Combined in the creation of these isolated characters, Park’s unique philosophical ideas, his tragic view of the world and his black humor make a surprise attack on what we believe in as true. Looking at these unique stories, we may call Park’s fiction “futuristic”, but it may also be that his new “nomads” have already been born, and are already making their attempts to settle outside of time.” — Kyung-sook Shin, the author of Please Look After Mom