Entries Tagged as ‘Korean America’

May 15, 2009

Liberate Laura & Euna Now.

Supporters of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the American journalists currently under arrest in North Korea, have made this poster to publicize the case. For the latest updates on how to help, including printing the poster and putting it up in your local communities, you can reach them on Twitter, @LiberateLaura.

May 15, 2009

The Kogi Taco Truck of LA

The search for the legendary Kogi taco truck of LA. The disembodied book comes of age? “The key thing to understand about Korean Mom punishments is that they will not make sense. Ever. It will not teach you that you have done something awful, or that you have made bad life decisions, and it will [...]

January 9, 2009

Books You Have Waited For Late At Night When You Had Nothing To Read

Miles From Nowhere, Nami Mun, Riverhead – Nami Mun’s novel in stories, Miles From Here,  the life of a Korean American runaway in the Bronx , is the book I hoped existed after I finished reading Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in 1994. So, that’s a long time, but, it’s here. The Torturer’s Wife, Thomas Glave, [...]

October 28, 2008

‘Foxes’ Preview, Page 1

Teddy O’Connor, my friend and collaborator, has finished page 1 of the graphic interconnected stories (comic?) that we’re doing, called Foxes. He sent this over to me. It’s blank as I’ll be adding the text in later, but this is how the story begins. I love it.

June 26, 2008

A Million Writers

Put yourself in the way of your fate, I tell my students, on the last day of the Wesleyan conference. It’s advice I got from a horoscope back when I was either getting into or out of graduate school. I don’t remember when. I tell them about community, about my experiences with the Asian American [...]

June 20, 2008

Korean Enough

I teach a class in the novel for three days at the Wesleyan Writer’s Conference, and then drive to New Haven to take the train into New York City Wednesday night, headed to an event co-hosted by Guernica Magazine and the Asian American Writers Workshop, a reading/party for the June fiction issue that I guest-edited. [...]

May 13, 2008

Tomorrow’s Koreanish Stars Today

People Magazine is catching a certain amount of flack this morning for having published an item that misidentifies a photo of Karl Yune as Rain, in the new Speed Racer film. Speed Racer, it’s worth pointing out, has 3 young attractive men of Korean descent on the cast, setting what might be a record for [...]

November 26, 2007

My Favorite Books This Week: The San Mateo APA Lit edition

Last night, over dinner in San Mateo with Professor Stephen H. Sohn of Stanford, who’s done some literary criticism of my first novel, Edinburgh, we talked about these books. And how everyone should read them. World Famous Love Acts, by Brian Leung A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by Yiyun Li We Should Never Meet, [...]

October 29, 2007

I don’t know, I just do.

On my visits to Korea, I felt very much like the wrong sort of grandchild, the lumpen half-breed, who couldn’t speak Korean and who couldn’t look Korean. How do you tell them apart, a cousin asked me, about Americans. I don’t know, I said. I just do. I didn’t tell him the white kids asked [...]

October 6, 2007

Stephen King Essay On Short Story Heals Short Story Problem Instantly

Sunday, in the New York Times Book Review, Stephen King wrote a hilariously touching essay about being on his knees at his local bookstore in order to find short fiction in literary journals, hidden under the Martha Stewart Living and Us Weekly magazines. He lamented the state of the short story and asked people to [...]