맨해튼 타임스퀘어 인근 타운홀에서 한국 디아스포라를 주제로 한 두 작가의 토론회가 열린다. '반도의 봄 (Spring On the Peninsula)'의 에리 신(Ery Shin)과 '더 밴드(The Band)'의 크리스틴 마-켈람스(Christine Ma-Kellams)가 타운홀의 "K-Town Hall Series"의 한 프로그램에서 한국 디아스포라를 논한다. '반도의 봄(Spring on Peninsula)'는 서울 직장인의 이야기, '더 밴드(The Band)'는 어느날 은둔생활을 하게된 K-팝 아이돌의 스토리를 담았다.

 

 

K-Town Hall Series

 

The Town Hall Presents

The Other Korea: Stories From The Diaspora

 

Sat / Oct 12 / 7:00 PM

The Town Hall, NYC: 123 West 43rd Street

 

This event takes place in The Town Hall Lounge. All tickets included both books.

 

 

Join authors Ery Shin (Spring On the Peninsula) and Christine Ma-Kellams (The Band) as they discuss their books and stories from the Korean diaspora. Part of Town Hall's "K-Town Hall Series," each ticket includes a copy of Spring On the Peninsula and The Band.

 

Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa in 1986. She was raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University and a doctorate in the same discipline from the University of Oxford. The author of Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years, a study of Stein’s later experimental gestures and their philosophical implications within Hitler’s Europe, she is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Spring on the Peninsula is her debut novel.

 

Christine Ma-Kellams is a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, Pushcart-nominated fiction writer, and first-generation American. Her work and writing have appeared in HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, Catapult, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, the Rumpus, and many more publications. The Band is her first novel. You can find her in person at one of California’s coastal cities or online at ChristineMa-Kellams.com.

https://www.thetownhall.org/event/the-other-korea-stories-from-the-diaspora

 

 

Spring on the Peninsula

A Novel

By Ery Shin

 

A desultory libertine mourns a failed relationship over the course of two harsh winters in this unprecedented portrait of millennials living in Seoul.

 

The time is roughly now and Kai, a white-collar worker, has just been abandoned by his longtime lover. Follow him through a labyrinth of alleyways as he reels from this sudden departure. Accompany him up snowy mountains where he contemplates ending his own life. That mourning can be both an art and ever-unfolding journey is epitomized in the paths that Kai crosses and the lives he alters for better or worse.

 

Kai is not the only one feeling disoriented and aimless these days. Those in his inner circle similarly experience personal crises as they go through their thirties in a nation simmering with class and generational tensions as well as the specter of new and old wars. Evocative of Dangerous Liaisons in its social appraisals, and in the tradition of Neruda’s erotic reveries, Ery Shin’s striking debut captures contemporary Seoul in all of its glory and turmoil. Phantasmagorical and melancholic, and daringly irreverent, Spring on the Peninsula is a poignant meditation on modern life in a city beset by North Korea’s shadow.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2289529/ery-shin/

 

The Band

A Novel

By Christine Ma-Kellams

 

A psychologist with a savior complex offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol in this “first great K-pop literary phenomenon” (Debutiful) that is perfect for fans of Mouth to Mouth and Black Buck. Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of global superstardom. But when his latest solo single accidentally leads to controversy, he’s abruptly canceled.

 

To spare the band from fallout with obsessive fans and overbearing management, Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of a Chinese American woman he meets in a Los Angeles H-Mart. But his rescuer is both unhappily married and a psychologist with a savior complex, a combination that makes their potential union seductive and incredibly problematic.

 

Meanwhile, in Seoul, the band’s music producer, Pinocchio, remembers his first brainchild: a girl group that tragically disbanded under mysterious circumstances. The past and the present combine to ignite a spiral of violent interactions that might change the fates of both the band members and the music industry.

 

In its “gripping exploration of the complexities that accompany fame” (Booklist), The Band considers the many ways in which love and celebrity can devolve into something far more sinister.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Band/Christine-Ma-Kellams/9781668018378