The Korea Herald

Ulysses celebration blooms in Seoul

Jun 8, 2011

Bloomsday, a commemoration to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce that also relives events from his novel Ulysses, is to be held in Seoul. “The evening will be a convivial mix of drama, readings and music,” said Ireland’s Ambassador Eamonn McKee. “It is a world-wide phenomenon which reflects the admiration and love for Joycean literature, specifically the greatest novel yet written, ...
Ancient documents to e-books: Seoul International Book Fair

Jun 8, 2011

Giant book event to feature exhibitions, seminars and meetings with authors The 17th Seoul International Book Fair, one of the biggest book events in Korea, opens June 15 at COEX in southern Seoul with a total of 572 publishers from 23 countries participating. The five-day event is filled with diverse special exhibitions, seminars, and events on a variety of themes in today’s international publ...
Smurf this! Scholar sees Stalin in comic-book realm

Jun 8, 2011

PARIS (AFP) - Just in time for Global Smurfs Day and a Smurfs movie in 3-D comes a little blue book from a French academic that has some fans of the sock-topped comic book characters seeing red. Antoine Bueno, who lectures at the high-brow Paris Institute of Political Studies, thought he was just having fun when he penned his 177-page analysis of the politics of Smurfland that's just been publis...
The greatest all-sport athlete

Jun 3, 2011

Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias By Don Van Natta Jr. (Little, Brown) Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky ― they were all great athletes, some of the best the 20th century had to offer. But none excelled in as many sports as Mildred “Babe” Didrikson, the two-sport Hall of Famer who helped found the Ladies Professional Golf Association and...
Heartbreaking youth, uncertainty

Jun 3, 2011

Indignation By Philip Roth Translated by Jeong Young-mok (Munhakdongne Publishing Corp, 11,000 won) Nobody really “gets” adolescence. Not the kids themselves, not the parents and teachers who have left it behind. Not even us as we look back years later. It implies mystique. An alluring mix of whimsy and danger, when everything seemed more important than it was, but also more possible. How do ...
Judy Moody’s mentor is just a big kid herself

Jun 3, 2011

Years ago when Megan McDonald, the now-52-year-old author of the popular children’s series “Judy Moody,” was writing picture books for the 2- to 4-year-old set, a grandmother came through her signing line at an event in Florida. Clutched to the elderly woman’s chest was a waterlogged, tattered copy of McDonald’s debut, “Is This a House for Hermit Crab?” The woman proceeded to tell McDonald that ...
New book offers Blount talk about the Big Easy

Jun 3, 2011

Roy Blount Jr. is a man who loves to talk. And one of his favorite places to talk about ― and in ― is New Orleans. “People there are loose and unpretentious and tend to enjoy talking,” says Blount of the Big Easy, which he calculates he has visited 42 times in his 63 years. “I love to be around people who like to talk picturesquely, without getting too forced about it.” Blount (pronounced “Blun...
Napoleon used years on St Helena to learn English

Jun 1, 2011
People at Harvard, MIT read a lot

May 30, 2011

Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the world's prestigious universities -- Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) -- topped the list of the most well-read U.S. cities, an online report by CNN said Friday quoting Amazon.com Amazon compiled its sales data for books, magazines and newspapers -- both in print and for its Kindle e-reader -- from Jan. 1, this year. The bookseller used...
Writing to put magic in the everyday

May 29, 2011

On first Asian trip, Michal Ajvaz talks about inspiration, nationalism in art As with other literary traditions, Czech fiction’s accessibility to Korean readers has long suffered from a lack of translation into Korean. Even with towering literary figures such as Franz Kafka among the country’s authors, it was only this March that the first anthology Czech short stories in Korean translation, “Pr...
Bradley Cooper drinks in life after ‘Hangover’

May 27, 2011

Barring the end of the world (it didn’t happen Saturday, did it?), or the even less likely scenario in which no one bothers to go out next weekend to see three guys wake up completely blotto, there will be a “Hangover: Part III.” “Obviously, it will depend on the success of the second one,” says Bradley Cooper, whose participation in the inaugural “Hangover” had more than a little to do with his...
New Books

May 27, 2011

Life of NYC’s most tribal borough The Devil She Knows By Bill Loehfelm (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Maureen Coughlin, a 29-year-old cocktail waitress at a seedy Staten Island bar, has dropped out of college and is lying to her mother about it. She tells herself she’s saving money so she can go back to school, but she knows that is also a lie. She pictures herself flirting for tips from drunks...
Summer reading: Virginia Woolf’s transformative touch

May 27, 2011

In the picture, I am probably 10 years old. I’m wearing blue jeans and a bright red sweater, and I’m perched on the stump of a redwood tree, surrounded by a forest of the same. On my lap, I hold an open book. My head is bowed, long blond hair studiously tucked behind my ears. I wish I could remember the book I was reading, but I can’t. What I do remember is that I knew my mother was taking the p...
Talk-show maven’s Book Club spawned literary stars and controversy

May 27, 2011

For some, a book club means Chardonnay, gossip and some bookish conversation. For Oprah Winfrey, it’s meant making bestsellers and, as she said last week, “the biggest controversy in our 25 years.” As her broadcast television show comes to a close, Winfrey welcomed the reason for that controversy ― the not-truthful memoirist James Frey ― onto two full shows of her final 10, putting her once-vita...
Literature must be free from ideology, politics: Gao

May 24, 2011

Chinese-born Nobel Prize winner says modern literature must break away from 20th-century ideologies Gao Xingjian, the Chinese-born recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, said all forms of literature must be free from outside control, including ideologies, politics, and the free market. He was speaking at a press conference Tuesday at Kyobo Bookstore in downtown Seoul, on the first day...