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Library of Korean Literature

Series · 20 books

By Eun Heekyung, Ki-young Hyun, Lee Seung-u, and more

Communication—or the lack thereof—is the subject of this sly update of the picaresque novel. No One Writes Back is the story of a young man who leaves home with only his blind dog, an MP3 player, and a book, traveling aimlessly for three years, from motel to motel, meeting people on the road. Rather than learn the names of his fellow travelers—or even invent nicknames for them—he assigns them numbers. There's 239, who once dreamed of being a poet, but who now only reads her poems to a friend in a coma; there's 109, who rides trains endlessly because of a broken heart; and 32, who's already decided to commit suicide. The narrator writes letters to these men and women in the hope that he can console them in their various miseries, as well as keep a record of his own experiences: "A letter is like a journal entry for me, except that it gets sent to other people." No one writes back, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some hope that one of them will, someday...

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Author

Jang Eun-Jin

Author · 1 books

Jang Eun-Jin (born 1976) is a female South Korean writer. Jang attended Cheonam National University in Gwangju from which she graduated with a degree in Geography. She has published four novels and a collection of short stories and has won three literary prizes in total The Chonnam Ilbo New Short Story Award in 2002, the Joongang Ilbo New Writers Contest in 2004, and the 14th annual Munhakdongne Award in 2009. Jang has had one book translated into English, No One Writes Back (Translated by Jung Yewon), which The Guardian reviewed as, “An extraordinarily rich and moving novel about a young man's journey through South Korea with his dog” Her subject is communication, or its absence, and the book is written as a picaresque. It is the story of a young man, MP3 player and blind dog, and their three-year goal-less journey, and who they meet on that journey. The fellow travelers are anonymous, earning numbers in replacement for names, but the narrator nonetheless writes them letters, in the hope that someday a letter will come back.