The Korean Wave has exploded in popularity in recent years. It’s evident in K-pop, K-drama, and webtoons, all of which originated in South Korea. The Korean Wave is stronger than ever in many countries, particularly in mine, which is only a few hours away from Seoul. K-pop concerts are held on occasion, and there are even Korean barbecue restaurants on almost every corner (samgyeopsal is to die for). This phenomenon is not going away soon, either. Everything Korean these days seems in high demand, even in various storytelling formats such as comics and books. The boom of K-drama-inspired novels has made it to romance publishing and beyond.

That being said, I have compiled 20 must-read historical fiction books set in Korea. Because this is a list of fiction with a historical bent, the majority of the books are set in medieval Korea, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, and/or during the Korean War. Each book portrays events from different time periods, providing us with new perspectives of our world. We get to discover Korean culture, traditions, and customs from a past long gone. We get to see what life was like in Korea during the wars, what hardships people faced, and what choices they made to survive. These books provide us with a deeper understanding of what Korea truly is, as told by Korean authors, outside of what we hear or see in popular culture.

Here are 20 must-read historical fiction books set in Korea to immerse yourself in the culture:

The most handsome man at my high school was so beautiful that I would have been happy to watch him plunge a clogged toilet. He had a flourishy name that I both can’t and would rather not remember. Gustavo. Gonzalo. Gianni. Goiter. Something. He ended up falling in love with a Mormon girl with a set of eyes so wide that she reminded me of a parakeet I once had. In the hallways, he would watch her with smile after big, moronic smile, crumpling under the hugeness of the luck that hooped and smothered the two of them. We all knew that he was thinking of proposing to her, which meant that he was about to convert to Mormonism, which is a long way of saying that there was nothing that made my blood jump more than thinking about this miracle couple working through a fatiguing bureaucratic process just so they could have sex.

Every day after school, I would pass his car in the parking lot. It was a Maraschino-colored Mazda Miata—a two-door soft-top with a curvy body like a woman’s. For some reason everyone was aware that nineties Miatas were delicate models with a knack for flipping and killing their owners in accidents against even marginally heavier vehicles. My best friend at the time thought this was delicious information. “One wrong sneeze and he’s dead,” she loved saying. Or – selectively stressing any mixture of the following words – “That has to be the stupidest car you could possibly buy.” This crotchety routine was boring before it started, but she made it very hard not to imagine his body getting scraped off the highway by some fabulous road shovel.

That Miata moved me. For as long as I knew him and her, as soon as I got into bed and shut my eyes, I would wonder what they did together in there. My mind held a picture of the Miata parked in front of the bakery in the strip mall by school. She would be in the passenger seat, and he would be visible through the shop window, buying her fruity, fatty prizes like banana cream pie and peach milkshakes and coconut donuts, balancing them on top of one another as he brought them back to go untouched and roast in the sun on the middle console as they drove away. Then, meaningfully, they would stare at each other after he turned onto the main strip. The floor of the car would be disgusting—hoagie wrappers, sugar shed from sour candies, pizza boxes in the back with the sauce and solidified cheese looking like the leftovers of a major surgery—and she, more gorgeous in counterpoint, would speak in a voice smooth and crotch-tightening, invoking her God and his testosterone. He would press a button, and the sky—which would be the exact same color of her jeans—would slide open. Her big eyes would be pointlessly full of tears. They would consider reaching out to grope one another, but in the gel of the dream, soft and void of logic, they would be too scared that in the process they might knock the donut or the whatever over and inspire some insane collision. Before I decided what love was or could be—and, for that matter, heaven and hell and eternal punishment; what it all was going to cost them—I would mash them into a savory pulp against a truck, chewing my cheeks down until I slept.

Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and NPR, among others.

In Rome in June the heat is liquid, a flood. It is the worst drought in seventy years. The heat rises from the paving stones. In Monti, a few streets from the Colosseum, the air shimmers in the Piazza degli Zingari and up the Via del Boschetto. From there, the Via Panisperna dips down toward the Piazza Venezia, which by the mid-morning has turned into a cauldron. By noon the water-sellers are sold out. In the Val d’Orcia, the obsidian and alabaster hills are now a dismal shade of yellow and my friend Katia opens the door overlooking the valley and prays for rain.

By July it is impossible to go out except in the early morning or in the evening. There are no fans for sale at the shop near the Madonna dei Monti where an old couple, a man and a woman, sit outside on camp stools; the place where I bought what I thought was an iron and when I came back to the flat with its tiny balcony and unpacked it, it turned out to be an electric carving knife. It is too hot even to sit by the fountain until late in the afternoon when an awning of shade creaks over the piazza, but inside the churches it is cool. Drawing a circle around the piazza, there are six churches within seven hundred feet of the fountain: the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli, in which the chains that bound Saint Peter are held in a reliquary; the basilicas dedicated to the martyred sisters Pudenziana and Prassede, which house the bones of three thousand martyrs and a portion of the pillar on which Christ was flogged; the church of Santa Maria dei Monti, on the site of a fourteenth century convent; the church of San Silvestro e Martino, on the Via Cavour which in the summer is lined by white magnolias, their waxy blossoms hidden in the burnt-edged leaves. In Rome, we learn, there is a phone app on which to find Masses at the nine-hundred odd churches throughout the city, called Ding, Dang, Dong, after the lyrics of the song about slumbering Giocomo—”Frere Jacques”—which appear as a web full of stars.

The sixth and by far the largest church, Santa Maria Maggiore, looms like a mother spider over the smaller churches and basilicas, pulling up the threads of the strade from the Via Cavour, towering over the magnolias, the reliquaries, the bakery with a scale model of the Colosseum in bread in the window, the Chinese markets piled high with espadrilles on the Esquiline Hill, which never seem to have any customers, the tourists fanning themselves by the barely liquid fountain, the man at the kiosk by San Pietro in Vincoli who has directed every passerby to his brother’s restaurant, Trattoria di Roma, near the cash machine by the Cavour station, for thirty years. Pasta! he says, Coca-Cola! Rome is a game of cat’s cradle. In Monti, an early morning walk is a pulled string drawn up towards the huge basilica, whose enormous facade looks more like a courthouse or a bank than a church. The piazza which folds down from the steps like a baby’s bib is white hot at 9 A.M. All the doors are closed, or are they? No. A white tent is set up at the south entrance, which is reached by following a line of metal fencing, permanently askew. Santa Maria Maggiore is part of the Holy See; to enter is to go from one country, Italy, to another, an embassy of the Vatican. Two young men wearing army uniforms are drinking coffee, their feet on the desk, machine guns on the folding chair beside them. They wave a visitor through.

In the mosaic in the apse by Jacopo Torriti, Mary in her blue robes sits next to Christ, floating over a moon the size of a thumbprint. The girls who come in from the street with bare shoulders are given blue paper shawls by the guards, so that they wander around the Basilica looking like madonnas who have been culled from the mosaics, or left to make up their own stories as they go along, as, in any case, we all do. In 352, during the Pontificate of Liberius, when a Roman nobleman, John, and his wife, a childless couple, decided to dedicate their fortune to the church they asked for a sign of what to do: it snowed in August on the Esquiline Hill, and the drifts outlined what would become the perimeters of Santa Maria Maggiore, sometimes, then as now called Santa Maria della Neve, Saint Mary of the Snow, a Pointillist panel written on the fine silk of the past, drawn through the eye of a needle. Every August, white rose petals float down through the nave to commemorate the groundbreaking.

In spring 2021, a photo still from Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon went viral. The image features the film’s protagonists, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), seated at a table, having just finished a meal. The table is Mollie’s table, in her home, in Osage County, Oklahoma. The larger setting is one of the most insidious criminal conspiracies in American history, a period known as the Osage Reign of Terror, wherein the white cattle rancher William King Hale colluded with associates, including Ernest, his nephew, to steal Osage oil fortunes. Sometimes this scheme involved white men marrying into Osage families and then sometimes murdering their new lovers. In the photograph, Mollie gazes over at Ernest, who’s looking up at the ceiling. In the frame, she is a Mona Lisa in semi-profile, a muse of multitudinous moods. What is that inscrutable expression on her face? Is she being coy? Flirtatious? Is that an inquisitive look? Or one of bemusement? Is she laughing at her beau, or at her predicament—the condition of falling in love with a racist doofus she knows is mainly interested in her money? (Oof.) The still became a meme when the New York Post tweeted that DiCaprio was “unrecognizable” in character; the replies underlined the actor’s utter recognizability. This still, an object of public fascination more than two years before the film’s general release, became a meme as social media users poked fun at the Post, but the meme cycle also enabled viewers to meditate on the interpersonal dynamics in the photo, dynamics they would be unable to view in context. The image is a distillation of the film’s central mysteries, and reading it is training for assessing the big questions at the heart of the movie: What does she see when she looks at him? What should we see when we look at them?

It’s fitting that a photograph was the film’s first offering, because Scorsese is always calling attention to the photograph as a marvel, and as an object, in his work. The director’s signature credit line— “A Martin Scorsese Picture”—is delightfully archaic. The phrase is redolent of the studio system, painted sets, and actors in redface. This is a picture that is partly about making pictures, and the tensions therein. Within the film’s first moments, the audience witnesses a succession of murders of Osage citizens. The deceased are posed with piety, stretched out on their beds, decked out in their best, arms crossed against their chests; this sequence, and some other shots interspersed throughout the film, recall James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead, which features the legendary portraitist’s stately photographs of funeral pageantry. And then there are the more direct references to image-making, mostly in montages of vernacular photography: souvenir photos at rodeos; roustabouts posing before a cameraman; wedding portraits; home video–style clips; newsreels of major events, including of the discovery of oil on Osage land, of members of the Osage Nation traveling to Washington, D.C., to talk with President Coolidge about the murders, and of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which that city’s white citizens killed numerous black residents and destroyed a thriving black commercial district. There are gorgeous studio portraits of Osage folks—who, the film tells us, call the moon “Mother”—sitting inside a paper moon, rendering that kitschy, sentimental photo format with cosmological poetry. As members of the Osage Nation line up to receive royalties from their oil allotments, a photographer advertises his services by using an emotional appeal: “Thirty-dollar photo for posterity. Don’t you want to preserve your family history?”

Of course, given the white residents’ attempts at exterminating the Osage, that last line is a bleak joke. In Killers, there’s a stark boundary between preservation and exploitation, one as distinct as that which demarcates the Osage reservation and off-rez areas. We’re constantly seeing people take in images, or participate in the making of their own: we see them looking, or being looked at, which adds another touch of paranoia to a film about a sprawling criminal conspiracy. But these metatextual scenes also underscore the limits of photography, and the fact that, in spite of photographic evidence, the brutality continues; as the end of the movie confirms, making art is no absolution. The film’s picture-taking brings to mind the ethnological work of someone like Edward S. Curtis, whose twenty-volume photographic study The North American Indian, comprising documentation of dozens of Indigenous nations, was initially funded by J. P. Morgan. Curtis’s work, rife with what the Diné artist and photographer Will Wilson calls “lacquered romanticism,” imprinted Indigenous images as hopelessly archival; in Curtis’s work they are a “vanishing people” tragically consigned to the past.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s most demanding epic of American grotesquerie, gestures toward this anxiety about the future. The film opens with an Osage child witnessing a ritual that the elders rightly worry will die out, and closes with a scene that serves as something like a contemporary bookmark to the opening, underscoring survival amid torturous conditions. Parts of this film can be grueling to watch, and it’s my sense that not all of the murders needed to be presented as graphically as they are. But the movie is also, at times, breathtakingly beautiful. The violence contrasts with the delicacy and intricacy of some of its themes. Maybe the killing is just Marty being Marty; after all, his oeuvre is filled with some of cinema’s most indelible sequences of violence, much of it slapstick, some of it deadly serious. Or maybe the occasionally grisly depictions are in service of twenty-first-century expectations of unambiguous moral transparency: seeing is believing, and here, it’s hard to see the cruelty done to Indigenous people and come away with any sense of moral equivocation on the part of the filmmakers.

July 20

After a day of spewing blood, I am in a French hospital.

Since I’ve never been sick in my life, I had no comprehension of how serious it is to puke red. By the afternoon, I’d lost so much blood my skin changed color and I couldn’t stand up or feel my hands. I was in the bathroom and my phone was in the bedroom and I couldn’t even crawl to it. I thought I was going to die there. I was thinking mainly of the book I want to finish, which is probably vain or inhumane, but that’s me. I did think of my daughter Sadie, who has really been kicked around by life in the three years since high school, but I have confidence that she will work it all out—she has a core that’s solid and true. I also thought of Bruno, my groom of a mere five months, who is so happy with me and was looking forward to the next thirty years together. But mostly it was the unfinished book that stuck in my craw.

A poet recently sent me an essay by George Oppen called “The Mind’s Own Place,” published in 1963. In it, Oppen grapples with lines from Brecht’s “To Those Born Later”: “What kind of times are these, when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” Oppen, a poet who had withdrawn from writing for nearly twenty-five years to pursue his political commitments, sees Brecht’s concern as valid: “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.” But he also acknowledges that there is “no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of ‘flowers,’ ” which tend to “stand for simple and undefined human happiness.” He goes on:

Suffering can be recognized; to argue its definition is an evasion, a contemptible thing. But the good life, the thing wanted for itself, the aesthetic, will be defined outside of anybody’s politics, or defined wrongly. William Stafford ends a poem titled “Vocation” (he is speaking of the poet’s vocation) with the line: “Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.” And though it may be presumptuous in a man elected to nothing at all, the poet does undertake just about that, certainly nothing less, and the younger poets’ judgment of society is, in the words of Robert Duncan, “I mean, of course, that happiness itself is a forest in which we are bewildered, turn wild, or dwell like Robin Hood, outlawed and at home.” 

Usually, on the date that a new issue of The Paris Review lands in bookstores and on newsstands, you receive a letter much like this one, announcing it and advertising its wares. In these letters, I have made a habit of loosely tying one piece in the issue to another, suggesting that, while The Paris Review is almost never put together with a theme in mind, some concern might have unconsciously risen to the surface as the editors made their selections—or even that these selections give a kind of animal unconscious to the magazine itself. This is not one of those letters, in part because it does not seem to me the time for any kind of argument about literature and why it might or might not be important. Also, as far as I can tell, the pieces in this issue share very little in common save their quality and perhaps the fact that they each represent, in some form, a quest to find out what the world is trying to be and what it is to live in it. In all this, I am grateful to our contributors, and to you, our readers, for accompanying them. As Louise Glück (1943–2023) tells Henri Cole in her Art of Poetry interview in the new Winter issue, “Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. That role is assigned to us and never removed.”

The paragraph is perhaps an undercelebrated unit of writing. Sentences get their due, as do individual words, but paragraphs? At the Review, we’ve asked writers to select a favorite paragraph and write a paragraph—or several!—on it. This is our first piece in a periodic series.

“Yes, I think you three have been quite happy. But I doubt if Cordelia has enjoyed a single moment of her childhood. It has all been a torment to her. She is not selfish. It is not what she has lacked that is an agony to her, it is what we all have lacked. She has hated it that all our clothes have been so shabby and that the house is so broken down. She has hated it that I have always been so late in paying Cousin Ralph the rent. She has hated it that we have so few friends. She hates it that your father has gone away, but not as you hate it. She would have preferred a quite ordinary father, so long as he stayed with us. She wishes she could have lived a life like the other girls at school. Your father’s writing, my playing, and whatever goes with those things, and the enjoyment we have had, are no compensation to her for what she has lost. Now, do not dare to despise her for this desire to be commonplace, to be secure, to throw away what we have of distinction. It is not she who is odd in hating poverty and”—she felt for the word—“eccentricity. It is you who are odd in not hating them. Be thankful for this oddity, which has brought you safe through terrible years. But do not think you owe it to any virtue in yourselves. You owe it entirely to your musical gifts. The music I have taught you to play must have made you realize that there is a great deal in life which is not affected by what happens to you. Also the technique has been more help to you than you realize. If you are not soft, it is because the technique you have mastered, such as it is, has hardened you. If God had not made you able to play you would be as helpless as Cordelia, and it is not her fault but God’s that she cannot play, and as God has no faults let us now drop the subject.”

This paragraph appears late in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, which is likely the novel I’ve reread more often than any other. And this passage is one that I return to all the time, both when life is hard and when life seems lenient enough to grant me a moment of reprieve. At the center of the novel are three sisters: Rose and Mary, twins who are prodigies on the piano, and Cordelia, their unmusical sister who dreams of becoming a world-famous violinist. This paragraph comes after Cordelia’s dream is dashed, and Mamma, their mother, who is a genius on the piano, speaks sternly to Rose and Mary and their brother, Richard Quin, admonishing them.

There are many things I love about the paragraph. As I’m typing it out, I’m surprised how long it is. (In fact, many of West’s best paragraphs are long, sometimes occupying an entire page or two.) Readily, West allows a character to speak without authorial interventions or interruptions from other characters. Were I discussing this in a writing class, comments would be bound to arise that this is not the right way to write dialogue, but who cares about the right way or the wrong way to write dialogue when one can listen to an extraordinary character like Mamma talk, as thrilling as listening to Shakespeare or a master pianist? The best writing—not only long passages of description but dialogues, monologues—always has an element of music and an element of poetry in it. This paragraph has both in abundance.

I watched the 1979 film Saint Jack on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee. Because the commercials often lurched on midsentence, I concluded that Freevee doesn’t pay people to insert the breaks between scenes. The deduction was sound, but being human, i.e., desperate for meaning, I nevertheless read intention into the placement of some of the ads. At the end of the movie, for example, when the main character must choose between collaborating with an occupying power or forgoing a fat check, Freevee broke to a spot for a skin serum by Vichy Laboratories. Unfortunately, the synergy didn’t last. The next commercial featured the socially conscious rapper Common, of the too-resonant baritone, shilling T-Mobile from a barber chair—a rich text, to be sure, but one without much relevance to Saint Jack, which is set in Singapore in the late sixties.

Based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name, the film is the director Peter Bogdanovich’s Vietnam movie as well as his Casablanca, a wartime melodrama about a raffish American trying to make a buck on the periphery of the conflict. A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.

Retrospectives of Bogdanovich’s career tend to describe it as his “loosest” film, a departure to the now for the director, whose interest in the visual style and genre tropes of Hollywood’s studio era, as opposed to those of the French New Wave, had distinguished him from his New Hollywood contemporaries. Shot on location by the minimalist cinematographer Robert Muller, with Cassavetes’s regular Ben Gazzara as Jack Flowers, and local non-actors , including prostitutes and madams, filling out the supporting cast, Saint Jack definitely looks like a gritty seventies flick. It brings to mind the Golden Era in other ways, however. Besides the shadow of Casablanca, there’s the film’s breezy script. Snappy dialogue could have upset Saint Jack’s lo-fi equilibrium, but fortunately we’re in Gazzara’s capable hands. As our weary yet amiable hero, a stoic drinker who takes all vicissitudes in stride, he gets the lion’s share of the script’s great lines—the trick is that he delivers these naturally, never “making a meal,” as film people say. He rarely gives the sense that Flowers is inventing a joke or a bon mot on the fly; usually, Jack seems to be repeating himself (it’s all the more to Gazzara’s credit that Jack never actually does). On the one hand, this chestnut effect is satisfying because it’s realistic: for Jack, clever patter isn’t an end in itself but a tool, like his warm smile or his impeccable manners, that he deploys to make bread. On the other, Jack is a wise man. He repeats himself because that’s what gurus do.

Saint Jack is not an ironic title. Flowers, improbably, is full of grace. When the gangsters arrive to shut down his bordello, he offers himself up at the front door to give his employees time to escape. The gangsters tattoo obscenities on his arms and deposit him in a ditch. Back at the brothel, which is now destroyed, he has a drink and a laugh and then goes straight to a tattoo parlor to get his new ink covered up. The tattooist asks him what he wants. Jack scans the room’s posters for two seconds before asking the man to garland his arms. What’s remarkable about Jack isn’t that he accepts his fate but that he accepts it immediately, without pitying himself or weighing his options. I was reminded of wu wei, the Taoist ideal of effortless action, which is something like a flow state that encompasses all one’s activity and not merely a discrete task like writing a movie review or playing a tennis match. Jack’s wu wei gets thrown into dramatic relief in the final act, when, for the first time, he agonizes over a decision.

In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points.

As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth.

Earlier this fall, Book Riot and the EveryLibrary Institute teamed up to create and distribute a series of research studies exploring parental perceptions of the library. The first in the series explored what parents thought about the public library, and results and analysis of those surveys are available here, here, and here.

The second survey was released this week and looked more specifically at how parents perceive library workers. In many ways, the responses to this survey should come as a breath of fresh air and a reminder that no matter how loud the book banners may be and no matter how successful their rhetoric has been in some arenas, the vast majority of parents trust and respect library workers. Let’s take a look at the responses for this latest survey that specifically address perceptions of librarians. In a future censorship roundup, we’ll compare the responses to when parents believe children are capable of selecting their own materials from the library across both surveys.

In the latest survey, 92% of parents and guardians stated that they trusted librarians to select appropriate material for children and to recommend appropriate materials to children.

Even more remarkable is that 96% of parents and guardians believed their children were safe in the library. This is an even higher percentage than seen in the first survey in the series, where 92% of parents felt their children were safe in the library.

The survey showed that 90% of parents were comfortable letting their children select their own materials. This aligns with a similar series of questions asked in the initial survey, where parents reported that most of the time, they were not made uncomfortable by materials borrowed by their children and that their child was not made uncomfortable with something they borrowed.