Considered aneccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon’s short storieshave nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most oftendrawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters anddrawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung’s stories nonetheless donot wallow in darkness, despair, or negativity. Instead, we find a world inwhich the bizarre and terrifying are often put to comic use, even in direst ofsituations, and point toward a sort of redemption to be found precisely in the“weirdest” and most unsettling parts of life . . .