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Drifting House

Krys Lee - Author

Hardcover | $25.95 | add to cart | view cart
ISBN 9780670023257 | 224 pages | 02 Feb 2012 | Viking Adult | 5.51 x 8.14in | 18 - AND UP
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An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction.

Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.

In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants' unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter.

In the tradition of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Drifting House is an unforgettable work by a gifted new writer.



"...sublime debut collection...The limpid, naturalistic prose and the flawless internal logic of these stories are reminiscent of the best of Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers."
-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"...breathtaking debut...Readers in search of exquisite short fiction beyond their comfort zone- groupies of Jhumpa Lahiri ... and Yoko Tawada ...- will thrill to discover Drifting House."
-Library Journal, starred review

"What wonderful and haunting worlds Krys Lee illuminates-a goose for a goose father, a sympathetic wife made bold by her husband's infidelity- all facets of a Korea and a Korean America made new by this exciting writer's entrancing vision."
-Janice Y. K. Lee, author of New York Times bestselling The Piano Teacher

"Sometimes with luck, passion, and great skill, fiction accomplishes things nothing else can, things of magical and abiding significance. Krys Lee's debut story collection is such a book."
-Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Failure

"Krys Lee's fascinating stories take place in gaps in the world, the surreal places that are in fact reality for her Korean characters, both at home and abroad. In those interstices there is horror and humor; there is sometimes haunting sadness, and there is on occasion grace."
-Jane Hamilton, New York Times bestselling author of A Map of the World and The Book of Ruth




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