Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean." But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life. With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.

The book explores the implications of the democratic movement that took place in Gwangju, a southwestern city of Korea, in May 1980 when military paratroopers brutally crushed a group of protesters who demonstrated against General Chun Doo-hwan, who was about to become the country s president. Because of the event now known as the Gwangju Uprising, 191 people perished and 852 were wounded. In The Gwangju Uprising, Choi Jungwoon analyzes various discourses and motives of the uprising and vividly paints the demonstrators street battles against paratroopers. He gives an in-depth scrutiny of the participants mentalities and incentives, and the type of brutality involved. He also examines the stages the participants went through during the uprising, from the peace and togetherness they had at first, to the internal conflict that soon followed, to the lessons they learned in the uprising s aftermath. Choi argues that the united front experienced by the participants during the uprising was a driving force that changed modern Korean history. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Choi Jungwoon is a professor of international relations at Seoul National University. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. His publications include The English Ten Hours Act: Official Knowledge and the Collective Interest of the Ruling Class (1984) and Ideological Configuration in Korean Politics (1998). ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR Yu Young-nan is a freelance translator based in Seoul. Her most recent translation is Yom Sang-seop s novel Three Generations (Archipelago Books, 2005).

A coming-of-age novel set during the Korean War, by Pak Wan-Suh, one of Korea's leading contemporary writers. The award-winning author of more than twenty novels, and numerous short stories and essays, Park often deals with the themes of Korean War tragedies, middle-class values, and women's issues. The novel is rich with scenes of cultural clashes, racial prejudice, and the kinds of misunderstandings that many American soldiers and Koreans experienced during the war years.