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The Paintings of Korean Shaman Gods broad appeal will be welcomed by both specialists and generalists in the fields of Asian Studies, Art History and Cultural and Religious Studies.

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Pearl is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition and Western modernity and haunted by an air of generalized gloom. Cycles of abuse abound as the characters enact violence within their power structures: parents beat children, teachers beat students, older students beat younger students. But at each moment the duress verges on bleakness, Ancco pulls back with soft moments of friendship between Pearl and her best friend, Jeong-ae. What unfolds is a story of female friendship, a Ferrante-esque connection formed through youthful excess, malaise, and struggle that stays with the young women into adulthood.

Served by a dry and precise line, Bad Friends viscerally captures the adolescent years of two young women who want and know they deserve something different, but, ultimately, are unable to follow through. In a culture where young women are at a systemic disadvantage, Ancco creates a testimonial to female friendship as a powerful tool for survival. Pearl forgets her worst adolescent memories, but she cannot ever shake the memory of her friendship with Jeong-ae during her most tumultuous years.

Bad Friends is translated from Korean by Janet Hong, an award-winning writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her translations include Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale (Graywolf Press, 2017) and Ha Seong-nan’s The Woman Next Door (forthcoming from Open Letter Books in 2019). She is currently long listed for the 2018 PEN Translation Prize.

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Madang is an artist and new father who moves to a quiet home in the countryside with his wife and young baby, excited to build a new life full of hope and joy, complete with a garden and even snow. But soon reality sets in and his attention is divided between his growing happy family and his impoverished parents back in Seoul in a dingy basement apartment. With an ailing mother in and out of the hospital and an alcoholic father, Madang struggles to overcome the exhaustion and frustration of trying to be everything all at once: a good son, devoted father, and loving husband.

To cope, he finds himself reminiscing about their family meals together, particularly his mother’s kimchi, a traditional dish that is prepared by the family and requires months of fermentation. Memories of his mother’s glorious cooking―so good it would prompt a young Madang and his brother into song―soothe the family. With her impending death, Madang races to learn her recipes and bring together the three generations at the family table while it’s still possible. This is a beautiful and thoughtful meditation on how the kitchen and communal cooking―in the past, present, and future―bind a family together amidst the inevitable.

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