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:

Book that made me cry on the subway: Stoner, John Williams
Book that made me miss my subway stop: Prodigals, Greg Jackson
Book I was embarrassed to read on the subway: The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis
Book someone asked me about on the subway: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Book I saw most often on the subway: Big Swiss, Jen Beagin

—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor

My reading this year was defined by fascinating but frustrating books. Reading to explore, reading for pleasure—sometimes the two don’t converge. In January and February, I battled against Marguerite Young’s thousand-plus-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, reading a pdf of it on my computer (why did I do this? I honestly don’t know) and developing a (hopefully temporary) eye twitch in the process. Among other things, the novel is about a bedridden woman in a decrepit mansion experiencing vertiginous opium hallucinations for pages on end. I’m glad I read it but I’m not sure I would recommend it. Speaking of opium, I also finally finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, another kind of fever dream (originally written for money, it’s a mishmash of autobiography, philosophy, and outright plagiarism) that is both completely bonkers and a foundation of modern literary criticism—in it, Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief.” One early reviewer of it expressed “astonishment that the extremes of what is agreeable and disgusting can be so intimately blended by the same mind.” Maybe I relate to this more than I’d like to admit. But a primary purpose of these lists is to give people ideas of what they might enjoy, more than what they might profitably suffer through. So, these books gave me pleasure this year: among others, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Hannah Sullivan’s Was It for This, Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. I learned a lot from all of them, too.

—David S. Wallace, editor at large 

This year I was so happy. I was happy for the main reason that I think people have been happy throughout human history, which is that I fell in love. At least that’s why stories tend to tell us that people are happy—happily ever after, and all that. When people asked how I was, I found myself saying, so happy, almost involuntarily, and then feeling a little ashamed, like maybe I was boring them. The thing is that other people’s happiness is often boring. All happy families are alike, and all that. I read a line in a short story in the recent Fall issue of The Paris Review, in fact: “We were happy on the road, and happiness can’t be narrated.” This felt true to me, and I also wanted to argue with it. Yet whenever I did, the terms seemed to slip away from me—what was happiness, anyway, and what did it mean to narrate it? And was I really so happy, when in fact lots of things in my life were going wrong, when as always there were days when I woke up listless or anxious, despite some undercurrent of feeling like I was terribly, almost frighteningly happy? Could there be such a thing as a narrative of happiness, and—here, I was thinking selfishly—what might it tell me?

I began to read with these ideas loosely in mind. In the fall, alone in Vermont, I read James Salter’s Light Years. This is a novel about a marriage—about the surfaces of a life and the cracks beneath that surface, the eventual rupture and the aftermath of that break. You have to wonder, a little: how did these two people ruin this beautiful life in a house on a river, filled as it was with bowls of cut flowers, bottles of wine, a pony, a dog? Skating on ponds in winter and Amagansett in the summer. Who would actually wreck such a thing and why? But then I remembered, surprisingly close to the end of the novel, that my own parents had ruined just such a happiness in just such a way, perhaps more dramatically, but not so differently; I had a childhood filled with cut flowers too. This is a tragic book, but it also manages to narrativize something about happiness, about how it is always a dance between the surface and the subterranean. This dance is obscure, even to its participants. We cannot know other people or their happinesses and we cannot quite understand even our own.

I also read, this fall, Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. This is a novel about two married couples, and I was interested especially in one of them. This couple is not very different from the couple in Light Years: they too have a beautiful and aesthetically oriented life characterized by a certain kind of abundance. There is also a woman whose power comes from her slight withholding, and a man who struggles against this, sometimes to the point of misery. And yet this novel is essentially comic. That is where Colwin points us in much of her work, toward that glass-half-full view of human relations and how they might be navigated; even when the actual situations might seem miserable (untenable affairs, as in Another Marvelous Thing), she takes a view of them that might be described as both clear-eyed and full of light. In Happy All the Time, happiness works its way into the narrative mostly through the characters’ acceptance of its limits, and their realizations that the fact of it is a grace. When the four characters sit down with four glasses of wine and toast “to a truly wonderful life,” I thought, Yes, there it is. I am always insisting on toasts, and remarks, on the mysterious power that lies in repeating over and over how lucky we are, really, to be in the company of those we love.

So it does exist, she thinks, happiness.

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.