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 the city’s 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 a sensuous and revelatory art 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. Doing for Seoul what Kathy Acker does for New York City and Virginie Despentes for Paris, Ery Shin evokes contemporary Seoul in all of its glory and turmoil. Phantasmagorical, melancholic, and daringly irreverent, Spring on the Peninsula is a poignant debut novel and a meditation on modern life in a city beset by North Korea’s shadow.

Examines how surrealism enriches our understanding of Stein's writing through its poetics of oppositions. Gertrude Stein's Surrealist Years brings to life Stein's surrealist sensibilities and personal values borne from her WWII anxieties, not least of which originated in a dread of anti-Semitism. Stein's earlier works such as Tender Buttons and Lucy Church Amiably tend to prioritize formal innovations over narrative-building and overt political motifs. However, Ery Shin argues that Stein's later works engage more with storytelling and life-writing in startling ways - most emphatically and poignantly through the surrealist lens. Beginning with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and continuing in later works, Stein renders legible her war-torn era's jarring dystopian energies through narratives filled with hallucinatory visions, teleportation, extreme coincidences, action reversals, doppelgangers, dream sequences spanning both sleeping and waking states, and great whiffs of the occult. Such surrealist gestures are predicated on Stein's return to the independent clause and, by extension, to plot, characterization, and anecdotes. By summoning the marvelous in a historically situated world, Stein joins her surrealist contemporaries in their own ambivalent crusade on behalf of historiography. Besides illuminating Stein's art and life, the surrealist framework developed here brings readers deeper into those philosophical ideas invoked by war. Topics of discussion emphasize how varied Jewish experiences were in Hitler's Europe, how outliers like Stein can be included in the surrealist project, surrealism's theoretical bind in the face of WWII, and the age-old question of artistic legacy.

Examines how surrealism enriches our understanding of Stein’s writing through its poetics of oppositions.   Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years brings to life Stein’s surrealist sensibilities and personal values borne from her WWII anxieties, not least of which originated in a dread of anti-Semitism. Stein’s earlier works such as Tender Buttons and Lucy Church Amiably tend to prioritize formal innovations over narrative-building and overt political motifs. However, Ery Shin argues that Stein’s later works engage more with storytelling and life-writing in startling ways—most emphatically and poignantly through the surrealist lens.   Beginning with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and continuing in later works, Stein renders legible her war-torn era’s jarring dystopian energies through narratives filled with hallucinatory visions, teleportation, extreme coincidences, action reversals, doppelgangers, dream sequences spanning both sleeping and waking states, and great whiffs of the occult. Such surrealist gestures are predicated on Stein’s return to the independent clause and, by extension, to plot, characterization, and anecdotes. By summoning the marvelous in a historically situated world, Stein joins her surrealist contemporaries in their own ambivalent crusade on behalf of historiography.   Besides illuminating Stein’s art and life, the surrealist framework developed here brings readers deeper into those philosophical ideas invoked by war. Topics of discussion emphasize how varied Jewish experiences were in Hitler’s Europe, how outliers like Stein can be included in the surrealist project, surrealism’s theoretical bind in the face of WWII, and the age-old question of artistic legacy.