Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet. Except this cabinet is filled with files on the 'symptomers', people whose weird abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker who spends his days looking after the cabinet, the symptomers are just a headache; from the woman whose doppelganger broke up with her boyfriend, to the man with a ginkgo tree growing from his fingertip. And then there's that guy who won't stop calling, asking to be turned into a cat... A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most ordinary lives, from one of South Korea's most acclaimed novelists. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert File Under: Fiction [ 12,000 Cans of Beer | Memory Mosaicers | Will Execution Inc. | Monkey of All Bombs ]

A dark, funny, deliciously different literary thriller about a jaded hitman, set in the criminal underworld of Seoul 'Kill Bill meets Murakami' D. B. John, author of Star of the North 'A work of literary genius' Karen Dionne, internationally bestselling author of Home 'I loved it!' M. W. Craven, author of The Puppet Show 'You'll be laughing out loud every five minutes' You-jeong Jeong, author of The Good Son 'A mash-up of Tarantino and Camus set in contemporary Seoul' Louisa Luna, author of Two Girls Down 'An incredible cast of characters' Le monde 'Smart but lightning fast' Brian Evenson, author of Last Days Plotters are just pawns like us. A request comes in and they draw up the plans. There's someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You think that if you go up there with a knife and stab the person at the very top, that'll fix everything. But no-one's there. It's just an empty chair. Reseng was raised by cantankerous Old Raccoon in the Library of Dogs. To anyone asking, it's just an ordinary library. To anyone in the know, it's a hub for Seoul's organised crime, and a place where contract killings are plotted and planned. So it's no surprise that Reseng has grown up to become one of the best hitmen in Seoul. He takes orders from the plotters, carries out his grim duties, and comforts himself afterwards with copious quantities of beer and his two cats, Desk and Lampshade. But after he takes pity on a target and lets her die how she chooses, he finds his every move is being watched. Is he finally about to fall victim to his own game? And why does that new female librarian at the library act so strangely? Is he looking for his enemies in all the wrong places? Could he be at the centre of a plot bigger than anything he's ever known?

Kim Ch'un-Su is one of the most original poets in modern Korean poetry. He was influenced by Rilke for a while, but embarked on a series of his own poetic experiments culminating in what he calls "the poetry of meaning." An avowed purist, he would not believe in ideas, ideologies, or even history. His poems, in consequence, tend to present only moments of vivid sensations and fantasies refracted through his consciousness. The translator, Kim Jong-Gil, has won the Modern Korean Literature Translation Award and the Poetry Prize in Korea.

Kim Ch'un-Su is one of the most original poets in modern Korean poetry. He was influenced by Rilke for a while, but embarked on a series of his own poetic experiments culminating in what he calls "the poetry of meaning." An avowed purist, he would not believe in ideas, ideologies, or even history. His poems, in consequence, tend to present only moments of vivid sensations and fantasies refracted through his consciousness. The translator, Kim Jong-Gil, has won the Modern Korean Literature Translation Award and the Poetry Prize in Korea.