If you loved the critically acclaimed and astonishing film Parasite—directed by Bong Joon-ho—and you’re looking for more great Korean artistry to scratch that itch, look no further than the incredible books in translation coming out of South Korea right now… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Vegetarian: A Novel

by Han Kang

Kindle price: $12.99

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.

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Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

Kindle price: $12.99

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

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The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly: A Novel

by Sun-mi Hwang

Kindle price: $4.99

This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild—and to hatch an egg of her own.

An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers. And with its array of animal characters—the hen, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the weasel—it calls to mind such classics in English as Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web.

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Scholars once doubted that pre-literate peoples could ever have composed and recited poems as long as the Odyssey, according to Matthew Wills from JStor Daily… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Who was Homer? Or, to put it another way, who wrote Homer? The identity of the Greek poet was a big question among nineteenth-century scholars. The Analysts (yes, they had a name) thought that multiple authors made up “Homer.” The Unitarians (not the religion), meanwhile, thought Homer was a single, masterful poet. The notion that long and involved poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey might have been recited by pre-literate peoples before being committed to writing was too fantastical a notion to be believed. How could anybody remember so many lines of poetry?

Enter Milman Parry, who burst on the scene in the late 1920s and became a professor at Harvard University in 1929. Parry used textual analysis, anthropology, and field work to show that pre-literate or semi-literate peoples could, in fact, recite long poems. Inspired by the Slavicist Matija Murko, who attended his thesis defense at the Sorbonne, Parry headed to the hills of what is now called Bosnia in the early 1930s. There he used aluminum disks to record pre-literate bards, guslari, who performed epske pjesme, epic oral songs. These bards used “the very same kinds of structures and patterns that Parry had found in the texts of Homer,” according to the late oral-communications scholar John Miles Foley.

“Instead of construing the Iliad and the Odyssey as either conventionally authored works or pieced-together editions, Milman Parry portrayed them as the products of a generations-long process of composition in performance,” Foley wrote. This helped revolutionize the way we understand the oral origins of epic poetry.

Parry died tragically in 1935, cutting short a brilliant career at the age of thirty-three. His work was carried on and expanded by his graduate student, Albert Lord, who could only get back to Yugoslavia after the end of World War II. The Parry/Lord “Oral Theory” about the origins of the Iliad and the Odyssey is now accepted by most everyone, wrote Foley, and is applied to “more than 150 different oral traditions from six of the seven continents and from ancient times through the modern day.”

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Jess Zimmerman from AtlasObscura wonders what would the perfect fantasy treat look like? Depending on where you’re from, probably not this… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Turkish Delight, or lokum, is a popular dessert sweet throughout Europe, especially in Greece, the Balkans, and, of course, Turkey. But most Americans, if they have any association with the treat at all, know it only as the food for which Edmund Pevensie sells out his family in the classic children’s fantasy novel The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Until I first tried real Turkish Delight in my 20s, I had always imagined it as a cross between crisp toffee and halvah—flaky and melting in the mouth. Here’s what it really is: a starch and sugar gel often containing fruit or nuts and flavored with rosewater, citrus, resin, or mint. The texture is gummy and sticky, some of the flavors are unfamiliar to American palates, and the whole thing is very, very sweet. (In addition to the sugar in the mixture, it’s often dusted with icing sugar to keep the pieces from sticking together.) While some Turkish Delight newbies may find they enjoy it, it’s not likely to be the first thing we imagine when we picture an irresistible candy treat.

I figured other people who had encountered Narnia before they encountered lokum probably had misconceptions just like mine, so I set out to discover what Americans imagined when they read about Turkish Delight. What kind of candy did we think would inspire a boy to betray his brothers and sisters?

The English name, Turkish Delight, is no misnomer. Turks make and consume lots of lokum, and it’s a popular gift, a sign of hospitality. The candy was invented in the early 19th century, reportedly by confectioner Bekir Effendi—though this claim comes from the company Hacı Bekir, still a premiere manufacturer of lokum, which was founded by Bekir and named after him. (He changed his name to Hacı Bekir after completing the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.) According to the Hacı Bekir website, Sultan Mahmud II was so pleased by the new sweet that he named Bekir chief confectioner.

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Best-selling author Diana Gabaldon hadn’t even set foot in Scotland when she began the book that launched the popular Outlander series, according to Erika Mailman from Th Washington Post… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Diana Gabaldon made Scotland so attractive to readers — and to watchers of the Starz television program, which resumes with Season 5 on Sunday — that the Scottish government’s tourism agency gave her an honorary Thistle Award for generating a flood of visitors to the fens, glens, jagged mountains and soft jade landscapes she so alluringly describes. According to numbers from VisitScotland, Outlander has increased tourism by an average of 67 percent at the sites mentioned in the books or used in filming.

Gabaldon, who is from Phoenix, wrote the first book and part of the second before traveling to Scotland. As a research professor pre-Internet, she read exhaustively to craft indelible images of Scottish places for the “practice novel” she kept secret from her husband. When the unfinished draft sold in a three-book deal for a “staggering amount of money at the time,” Gabaldon let her professorship lapse and headed to Scotland. Despite having no Scottish heritage, she says, “I remember seeing the green land rising and thinking, ‘This feels like home.’ ” She and her husband parked at Carter Bar, where she posed for a photo in front of the England-Scotland border stone. This stone appears in Book 3, “Voyager,” where the character Jamie says of it, “Looks like the sort of stone to last a while,” according to fan Karen Henry, who blogs at Outlandish Observations.

See full post on The Washington Post

Clive Cussler‘s literary fantasies and larger-than-life exploits swirled together for decades. He wrote 85 books, selling no fewer than 100 million copies, and located scores of shipwrecks…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Clive Cussler, the author and maritime adventurer who captivated millions with his best-selling tales of suspense and who, between books, led scores of expeditions to find historic shipwrecks and lost treasures in the ocean depths, died on Monday at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for his publisher, Penguin Random House. No specific cause was given.

Mayan jungles, undersea kingdoms, ghost ships, evil forces out to destroy the world, beautiful women, heroes modeled on himself — Mr. Cussler’s vivid literary fantasies and his larger-than-life exploits swirled together for four decades, spinning off more than 85 books and locating almost as many shipwrecks.

A college dropout who once pumped gas and wrote advertising copy, Mr. Cussler resorted to a hoax to get his first book published. But his work — mostly action thrillers of the James Bond-Indiana Jones kind, plus nonfiction accounts of his marine quests and a few children’s books — made him a global celebrity.

His books sales have been staggering — more than 100 million copies, with vast numbers sold in paperback at airports. Translated into 40 or so languages, his books reached The New York Times’s best-seller lists more than 20 times, as he amassed a fortune estimated at $80 million.

Mr. Cussler looked like the hero of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” You had to imagine the battered straw hat and the tired shoulders hunched over a gunwale, but after years of roaming oceans and diving for wrecks, he had that seafarer’s husky build and sunburned cheeks, and his face, more sea dog than bibliophile, was flecked with gray: the grizzled beard, the mustache, the eyes, the gray-white hair.

Often compared to the thrillers churned out by Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and Ian Fleming, the Cussler novels featured formulaic plots, one- or two-word titles (“Cyclops,” “Dragon,” “Inca Gold,” “Poseidon’s Arrow”) and frequently a recurring hero, Dirk Pitt, an undersea explorer who cheats death and saves the world as he foils the diabolical plots of megalomaniac villains, while satisfying his taste for exotic cars and lusty women.

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Young women of color are leaving publishing in droves while mediocre white men continue to find enormous success while making subzero effort according to Ian Parker in a scathing New Yorker expose… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. Like “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath.

Mallory sold the novel in a two-book, two-million-dollar deal. He dedicated it to a man he has described as an ex-boyfriend, and secured a blurb from Stephen King: “One of those rare books that really is unputdownable.” Mallory was profiled in the Times, and the novel was reviewed in this magazine. A Washington Post critic contended that Mallory’s prose “caresses us.” The novel entered the Times best-seller list at No. 1—the first time in twelve years that a début novel had done so. A film adaptation, starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman, was shot in New York last year. Mallory has said that his second novel is likely to appear in early 2020—coinciding, he hopes, with the Oscar ceremony at which the film of “The Woman in the Window” will be honored. Translation rights have been acquired in more than forty foreign markets.

Mallory can be delightful company. Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, recently recalled that Mallory, as a junior colleague in the New York book world, had been “charming, brilliant,” and a “terrific writer of e-mail.” Tess Gerritsen, the crime writer, met Mallory more than a decade ago, when he was an editorial assistant; she remembers him as “a charming young man” who wrote deft jacket copy. Craig Raine, the British poet and academic, told me that Mallory had been a “charming and talented” graduate student at Oxford; there, Mallory had focussed his studies on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming, brilliant impostor.

Now thirty-nine, Mallory lives in New York, in Chelsea. He spent much of the past year travelling—Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia—for interviews and panel discussions. He repeated entertaining, upbeat remarks about his love of Alfred Hitchcock and French bulldogs. When he made an unscheduled appearance at a gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he was greeted with pop-star screams.

Read full post on The New Yorker

Melissa Harris Perry at Glamour, gathered extraordinary women of color working in many different fields and asked them about the books that helped them fall in love with reading… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

I loved that Hurston used Southern U.S. patois to tell the story. It was the first time I read everyday people’s language in an acclaimed text. Not since Ms. Lou of Jamaica had I read dialect in text. But the best part of the book was the evolution of Janie. She was a beautiful mixture of confidence and insecurity—like so many of us. —Janice Johnson Dias, Ph.D., Marley’s mom, associate professor of sociology at John Jay College, and author of the forthcoming Parent Like It Matters: How to Raise Joyful Changemaking Girls

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“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” by Ntozake Shange

For Colored Girls…, especially the poem “toussaint,” was transformational for me. So many books I read in school were assignments, and I read them to fulfill a lesson for school. For Colored Girls wasn’t about school—it was for my soul. —Tamron Hall, Emmy Award–winning journalist and host of The Tamron Hall Show

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“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

The moment I began reading, I knew Maya Angelou had written this book for girls like me. This book let me know that it was okay to be a little brown girl with a big Arabic name in a place called Lynchburg, Virginia, with the audacity to imagine possibilities unbound by identity. I’ve been singing ever since. —Khalilah Brown-Dean, Ph.D., associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University and author of Identity Politics in the United States

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“Double Trouble, #1 Sweet Valley High” by Francine Pascal

It might seem odd for me to choose a book about blond twins, but the Sweet Valley High books revealed many of the complicated confusing aspects of being a young girl. Pascal’s characters have a resilience and strength that my sisters and I devoured. We’d sit for hours discussing the shenanigans of Elizabeth and Jessica. This was what it meant to truly love reading, and it laid the foundation for my work as an academic. —Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University and the cohost of FAQ podcast

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“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume

I was born late in the year and skipped kindergarten, which made me nearly two years younger than my classmates. It was fine academically, but physically I was insecure as everyone else developed. I wore pads every day for years in anticipation! I thought I would never mature. Margaret’s vulnerability helped me make meaning of my own experiences. When I later read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, I connected vulnerability to race and gender. I’ve spent the rest of my life reading to dismantle racial and gender hierarchies. —Alexis McGill Johnson, acting president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund

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Read full list on Glamour.com