Hwang Sun-won, perhaps the most beloved and respected Korean writer of the 20th century, based this extraordinary novel on his own experiences in his North Korean home village between the end of World War II and the eve of the Korean War when Korea had been divided into North and South by its two "liberators" - the United States and the Soviet Union. In this story the Soviet-backed communist party, using the promise of land reform, sets people at each other's throat. Portrayed here is an entire community caught in the political and social firestorm that brings out the selfishness, cruelty and ignorance of simple people, but also shows their loyalty and nobility. Compelling here, too, is a heroine who represents the "eternally feminine" for all Korean men, and the setting, the harsh political, psychic and physical landscape of rural postwar North Korea rarely glimpsed by the outside world. Hwang Sun-won is an artist of consummate delicacy and subtlety, and his writing is marked by keen psychological insight and steely asceticism. While three collections of his short stories have appeared in Hong Kong and the West, "The Descendants of Cain" is the first English translation of a Hwang Sun-won novel.

Hwang Sun-won, perhaps the most beloved and respected Korean writer of the 20th century, based this extraordinary novel on his own experiences in his North Korean home village between the end of World War II and the eve of the Korean War when Korea had been divided into North and South by its two "liberators" - the United States and the Soviet Union. In this story the Soviet-backed communist party, using the promise of land reform, sets people at each other's throat. Portrayed here is an entire community caught in the political and social firestorm that brings out the selfishness, cruelty and ignorance of simple people, but also shows their loyalty and nobility. Compelling here, too, is a heroine who represents the "eternally feminine" for all Korean men, and the setting, the harsh political, psychic and physical landscape of rural postwar North Korea rarely glimpsed by the outside world. Hwang Sun-won is an artist of consummate delicacy and subtlety, and his writing is marked by keen psychological insight and steely asceticism. While three collections of his short stories have appeared in Hong Kong and the West, "The Descendants of Cain" is the first English translation of a Hwang Sun-won novel.

These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the Korean War.

"Lost Souls" echoes the exceptional work of China's Shen Congwen and Japan's Kawabata Yasunari. Modernist narratives set in the metropolises of Tokyo and Pyongyang alternate with starkly realistic portraits of rural life. Surrealist tales suggest the unsettling sensation of colonial domination, while stories of the outcast embody the thrill and terror of independence and survival in a land dominated by tradition and devastated by war.

Written during the chaos of 1945, "Booze" recounts a fight between Koreans for control of a former Japanese-owned distillery. "Toad" relates the suffering created by hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, and stories from the 1950s confront the catastrophes of the Korean War and the problematic desire for autonomy. Visceral and versatile, "Lost Souls" is a classic work on the possibilities of transition that showcases the innovation and craftsmanship of a consummate--and widely celebrated--storyteller.