Snowy Day and Other Stories

About

Before he became one of the world's most celebrated film directors, Lee Chang-dong was a fiction writer whose stories examined the fault lines of Korean society with the same unflinching gaze he would later bring to cinema. Class divisions form impassable rifts. Submission to the status quo exacts devastating psychic costs. Characters navigate a Korea transformed by industrialization but haunted by the violence of its recent past. These stories, published in English for the first time, reveal the literary roots of the director behind Burning, Poetry, and Peppermint Candy. The prose is vivid and unsentimental, each story a precisely constructed window into lives shaped by forces larger than any individual can control. The fiction that came before the films — and proof that Lee Chang-dong's vision was fully formed long before the camera started rolling.