Bücher veröffentlicht von Open Letter

When truth is more gruesome than fiction—Ha Seong-nan is there. When people give in to their most intrusive thoughts—Ha Seong-nan is there. When man is more animal than animals themselves—Ha Seong-nan is there. In Wafers, her third short-story collection to appear in English, Ha continues to weave troublesome coincidences into the seemingly banal in her signature style of engrossing and unsettling prose. A best-seller in Korea, Ha Seong-nan is one of the stars of contemporary short fiction, writing edgy, socially conscious stories that bring to mind the novels of Han Kang and the film Parasite.

"Demetrio Rota, a garbage collector from Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoons and assembles puzzles at night before leaving for work. His daily life is mediocre and he keeps his balance through sheer exhaustion. However, through the puzzles, Demetrio inspects and sorts through his own memories. At the end of the journey through his history, the present seems to devour him, until he's left with only the emptiness of himself and his daily misery. A parable of memory and deterioration, Andrâes Neuman's Bariloche juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city; being uprooted with returning to one's origins, with a language fascinated by both lyricism and rottenness"--

Journalist Wojciech Tochman addresses the abandoned and lonely in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where the memory of terror persists.