A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction

A Ready-Made Life is a collection of translations of Korean short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when Koreans writers and intellectuals were just beginning to experiment with the short story form. The collection offers a diversity of stories whose styles range from comedy to romance to politics. Fulton and Kim do a good job of capturing the Korean authors’ styles of expression. The only weakness of this volume is that it sometimes doesn’t provide much explanation for certain peculiarities present in the stories. For instance, characters in some of the stories included in the volume have one letter names such as "P" or "M". I was left curious as to whether Korean authors actually had a common practice of using Roman letter names for their characters or whether these letter-names were somehow derived from Korean by the translators. Yet this is a minor defect that could be corrected by a few explanatory footnotes. Taken as a whole, this book provides a good introduction to Korean literature from a period that has been neglected by Koreanists in both Korea and the United States. —Amazon.com Reviewer