VOL.93/2026.04

Notable Literary Works Selected by Critics Across Generations - Differences and Shared Sympathy inGenerational Book Preferences -

 

 

2026.02

 

 

 

This Special Project introduces six literary works highlighted by critics across generations. Issues such as unknown worlds, individuals gazing into anxiety, the disintegration of the ideal subject, the reconstruction of care and family models, and the social sensibilities of 21st-century youth stand out. Should we stay in this problematic reality, run away, become immersed, or solve it? There is no right answer. The authors are messengers,conveying these situations and processes through the minute temperature of language.

 

 

 

 

The 20s Perspective - Sollim Lee, Cultural Critic

 

Ironically, in conversations among people in their 20s welcoming the New Year, fortune-telling and shamanic divination appear as often as New Year's resolutions. Perhaps it stems for a subtle undercurrent of pessimism — the feeling that even with hope and hard work, the future remains unguaranteed. They have no faith, yet their footsteps are busy seeking out gods. The way commentslike "I heard my luck this is...." naturally slip into discussions about goals reveals a stark reality. It illustrates just how deeply the realization has set in that life is governed by variables beyond individual control, and that these unseen forces hold significant sway over one's destiny.

 

Yoon Ina, widely recognized for her prose, captures a world where that very ‘unknowability’ has become the norm in her first full-length novel, Even if God Leaves. In this novel, which illuminates the life of a shaman whose deity abandoned her mid-ritual and those around her, the god is notably absent from beginning to end. After the standards that explained and guaranteed the world vanish, the characters seem to wander for a while but they soon support each other’s lives in their own clumsy ways. Among those who share old superstitions—that the number 4 is ominous, that one shouldn't trim nails at night, or that stepping on a threshold lets luck escape—what remains in the place where god left is not silence, but the voices of humans who have inextricably become interwinedwith one another. Even if God Leaves follows to the very end how humans share the heavy burden of aimless faith in an era where the object of belief is gone. The characters, who grumble that they can’t see an inch ahead, or even then minutes into the future, yet manage to navigate adversity well, feel strangely endearing by the end.Yoon Ina not transform human fragility into a possibility for overcoming, nor wraps it in the language of hope. She simply leads us to that point and seems to offer a gentle smile, as if saying."What do we really know? Us humans, we don't know much, do we?"

 

Chung Bora and Choi Uitaek’s novel, In That Case, We Go to Pohang, pushes this "unknowability" a step further. In this work, a collaboration between two authors active in the SF genre and bearing the title of ’Korea's first relay full-length novel,’ it is worth noting thestory itself is constructed. The authors set up two characters who have lost their entire property in a borehole investment scam. With only the minimal plot outline that these two head toward Pohang while harboring suspicions each other, the authors take turns writing one chapter at a time. . Since the narrative progresses without even the authors knowing how the next scene will unfold, this novel premises uncontrollability from the very beginning. The subject of a borehole business also meshes exquisitely with this novel’s format. This is because the structure of a drilling business—entrusting current money and time while believing in resources that might exist somewhere underground—overlaps with a relay narrative, where one author's choice is layered upon another's. In In That Case, We Go to Pohang, uncertainty is not an obstacle to be overcome, but the operating mechanism of the story itself. As the author's control loosens, the story paradoxically gains a more vivid momentum.

 

Faced with the same premise of ‘unknowability,’ these two novels take steps in distinct directions. Even if God Leaves chooses not to explain life after the defining standards of the world have vanished,it traces how the characters traverse that viod through everyday language and relationships.On the other hand, In That Case, We Go to Pohang elevates ‘unknowability’itself into a condition and format of the narrative, actively exploiting the inability to predict the next scene. In a sense, one proceeds by withholding explanation, while the other advances byactively designing uncertainty. This approach – keeping the story moving without attempting to resolve the ‘unknowability’ - is the persuasive narrative possibility that both novels present./span〉

 

 

 

 

The 30s Perspective - Maeng Junhyuk, Publishing Editor

 

I am not fond of writing that makes a fuss. However, this notion of ‘fuss’ is a subtler area than one might think. What counts as a fuss and what doesn't likely varies from person to person. To me, writing without such a fuss is writing that is honest and candid. I believe if an emotion is felt deeply, it shold be expressed deeply; if felt lightly, then lightly. Of course, a reader can never truly know how much pain the author suffered or how deeply they felt. Therefore, what matters is sensing the integrity—the attitude that the author is speaking only as much as they genuinely felt. I often perceive a ‘fuss’ when the writing seems to say more than what was actually felt. Of course, there is always the possibility that the author felt nothing yet successfully deceived the reader. When I encounter such a skillful writer, I feel an urge, as a reader, to engage in a duel with them.

 

Judged by this standard, Kim Umji’s Wiry was a book that struck the exact chord of what I look for. The writings in this book generally do not speak loudly. They do not organize emotions for display, nor do they provide a easy conclusion for the reader to follow. However, precisely through this method, the book accurately articulates the emotion of ‘anxiety’. "The woman said she liked japchae. That she loved japchae so much she wanted to swim inside it." "I really wanted to let her swim inside japchae." "Do you want to die inside japchae? I asked her." "Not die, but transform." Faced with such dialogue that abruptly surfaces amidst an uneventful flow, the reader often pauses - but that is all. Reading these pieces,I felt not that I had ‘unverstood.’ but that I had briefly stood near the spot where the author was standing. Kim Umji does not try to explain anxiety or imbute it with meaning. However, that very aloofness reads as honesty. She spares her words even when it seems she could say more, and brings the sentence to a close right at the point where emotions might otherwise swell. As a reader, one clearly receives the attitude: “This is as much as I will say.”

 

Reading by this same standard, Kim Eunhan’s I Think These Kinds of Things Are Also Fun is a book that reaches the same point in a different way than Wiry. Rather than dealing with anxiety head-on, this book adopts an attitude of carefully selectingviable options while fully acknowledging thatanxiety. It steps back in situations where a fight is not strictly necessary, and instead of charging through life, it first explores angles that can reduce the burden. It is writing that leans more toward arranging ways to coexist with anxiety rather than eliminating it. This attitude is composed and candid. While it is stable, it simultaneously reveals a commensurate evasive tendency. Thus, there were moments when the author’s method of discovering joy felt like a strategy chosen to suffer less damage from life. Yet, the reason I could not easily dismiss this book is that Kim Eun-han does not romanticize or actively defend his attitude. He simply suggests that there are people who view things this way, and people who make such choices—albeit with a touch of cowardice mixed in. I liked the fact that he wrote it down exactly as it is. So, to be honest, while reading, I found myself constantly searching for where the author’s lie might be hiding.

 

When placed side by side, the difference between the two books is distinct. Kim Umji does not avoid anxiety but chooses not to speak of it unnecessarily, whereas Kim Eunhan acknowledges anxiety only to step aside at a feasible angle.One adopts an attitude of endurance, while the other is closer to an attitude of management. However, they are alike in that both focus less on how to eliminate anxiety and more on the attitude with which to handle it. At the same time, neither book wallows in its own anxiety. It is the choice to stop speaking even when there is more to say, and to write only as much as was truly felt. Whether enduring or sidestepping, what mattered was the resolve not to make a fuss using anxiety as fodder. It was this very attitude that made me trust these writings to the very end. What I confirmed in these two books was not a way to eliminate anxiety, but two distinct forms of honesty, each shouldering anxiety in its own way.

 

 

 

 

The 40s Perspective - Mihyang Kim, Publishing Critic

 

 

In the early to mid-2000s, novelist Jeong Yihyun clearly held an undisputed ‘place’ within the Korean literary scene. To me, having just started my college life around that time, the protagonists of her novels - epitomized by My Sweet City - were the ‘successful older sisters’ who had quickly mastered the rules of the city and navigated love and work with a ‘sophisticated pose.’ Jung Yi-hyun herself, a senior alumnus and a professor at our university, was exactly the same. To this day, I cannot forget the sight of a friend who, with a flushed face after attending her lecture, would speak feverishly about her novels and her teaching style. Throughout my reading of No People Zone, I was reminded of those ‘successful older sisters of 2006. I watched them—who once struck sophisticated poses in love and work according to the rules of the city—now standing on the game board again with middle-aged bodies. And I gazed at them as someone who, after twenty years, has also become middle-aged. It's not just age that has changed for the narrators in the novel, the author, and myself. The difficulty level of life has also changed. Fora "middle-aged" "woman" in 2026 South Korea, labor and caregiving, housing and relationships rush in all at once, and the life that tries to ’manage well despite all obstacles’ loses its footing more frequently.

 

The characters in No People Zone know how to save face, but they no longer remain mere "model subjects." They pretend to be calm in the face of cracks in relationships, then suddenly cross the line sharply. That sharpness is not a grand declaration, but a small rebellion pushed up by accumulated fatigue and experience. Perhaps that is wh the scenes in the novel feel exceptionally realistic, and while making the reader laugh one moment, only to abruptly evoke a deep sense of pathos the next. Jeong Yihyun’s signature prose is sleek.Emotions are not exaggerated, and events are not over-explained. Instead, she accurately pinpoints the texture of the "rules" we encounter daily. The characters,living through lives transformed by institutional vessels like companies, families, and housing, do not declare this realitya tragedy. They simply learn the technique of selecting their expression for the next moment. Therefore, No People Zone is a Korean urban novel, yet simultaneously a record of a sensibility of daily life that crosses borders. Situations demanding courtesy, moments of swallowing grievances, and people moving once again for the sake of tomorrow. The image of that "us" found everywhere is vividly captured in this book. What today's readers need might not be grand salvation, but rather this kind of precise empathy. That empathy is the power that makes one turn the pages of books again that have lost their place to video media.

 

Park Ji young’s novel Charles Bukowski Typewriter is set in a near future where "life transition" has solidified into an institution, showing head-on how easily an individual’s old age is reduced to the language of administration and efficiency. An institution where, instead of growing oldaging as a human, one can transition into another species or a different form of life. On the surface, it is promoted as an "opportunity to live out one’s remaining days exactly as desired.“ In reality, however, this opportunity is merely a class-stratified choice, and essentially a politely packaged recommendation for the elderly to exit the stage, veiling its true intent. Calculations asserting that the cost of supporting a single elderly person could sustain tens or hundreds of wild animals or rare protected species blatantly show a world where numbers takes precedence, even when discussing dignity. Faced with the invitation to ‘choose the life you want,’ the protagonist Seung-hyeinstead feels the inequality of options. Ultimately, she transitions into an inanimate "typewriter" and is placed in a memory depository. There, with a sentence by Charles Bukowski attached to her back, she becomes a body that receives and transcribes the confessions of others. For Seunghye, now a typewriter, the spoken words of others remain intact as a physical sensation of impact and pain. This work provides sensory proof thatrecording is at once healing and testimony, and often violence. For the act of leaving words behind is not merely a technique of recording, but an act of receiving, transcribing, and enduring the life of another.

 

In this way, Charles Bukowski Typewriter directs the reader’s gaze not toward the ‘next life,’ but back to the life they are living now. The physical changes that accompany aging, the distance in relationships that remains difficult to navigate even as one grows older, and the sentences that ultimately remained unspoken... Eventually, what Seung-hye reaches is not some grand answer, but the will to "write" and to "be written," alongside a small period remaining at the end. Rare is the work that evokes so solidly and yet so strangely the universal anxiety transcending nationality and generation—the question of what we will leave behind before our existence vanishes. Even after the striking sound of the typewriter in the novel stops, let us fully take in the sentences that will continue to be typed within our hearts for a long time.

 

 

 

 

 

Sollim Lee: How to continue the story while embracing the unknown.
Maeng Junhyuk: Two types of honesty in handling anxiety.
Mihyang Kim: Two books depicting how the social demand to "live well," rules, and institutions pressure and transform personal life and dignity.

 

 

 

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Written by Sollim Lee (Publishing Editor, Cultural Critic)

As an editor, she contemplates books that will stand the test of time, while as a critic, she keeps a keen eye on new releases that demand to be read in the here and now. She is also a reader who dreams of a day where she can step aside from professional concerns to simply read to her heart's content, secretly hoping to one day find herself accidentally locked inside a library.

 

Written by Maeng Junhyuk (Publishing Editor, Reader)

Rather than aiming to craft a polished review or a perfect introduction, my true hope is to accurately convey the ‘code’ shared by myself and the ‘us’ out there somewhere. As a South Korean reader in my thirties who loves literature, I seek tocarefully give voice to a part of that sensibility..

 

Written by Mihyang Kim (Publishing Critic, Essayist, IT Service Planner)

She worked as a publishing editor for thirteen years, spending three years on books and ten years planning and editing magazines. She is the author of the essay Mother Said She Was Not Happy, and co-authored Key Words of the Korean Publishing Industry 2010-2019, What is Film?, and Goods Caution. Having served as a Creative Director at a tech company, she is currently designing, interpreting, and recording the world as a service planner and storyteller.