Margins
Old Wrestler book cover
Old Wrestler
2019
First Published
3.31
Average Rating
29
Number of Pages

Part of Series

A retired wrestler struggles with amnesia and anxiety after he is invited to return to his home town for an event. Back in once-familiar surroundings, he wrestles to make sense of things as he is confronted by faces, scenes and smells recalled from a celebrated past. From the Yeoyu collection, a selection of eight short stories translated from Korean, in collaboration with publisher-activist and translation trailblazer, Deborah Smith, and featuring writers such as Han Kang and Bae Suah, among others less familiar to an English-speaking audience. ​여유, Yeoyu, means something like 'scope' and/or 'relaxed' in English; scope to be yourself, to follow your own interests. In some ways it means the opposite of being constrained by convention, more to be unbounded in such a way. In a sense, it means to be oneself but with enough 'left over' — for others, maybe. It is intended to capture the diverse range of themes and styles the series, and Korean literature far more widely, has to offer the curious reader and also to say something figurative and fun about the act and process of translation.

Avg Rating
3.31
Number of Ratings
89
5 STARS
6%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
53%
2 STARS
9%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Sungtae Jeon
Sungtae Jeon
Author · 1 books
전성태 (Jeon Sungtae) was born in 1969 in South Korea. He studied creative writing at Chung-Ang University and started his career in 1994 by winning the Silcheonmunhak New Writer’s Award. His published works include the short-story collections Second Self-Portrait (2015), Wolves (2009), Over The Border (2004), and Burying Incense (1999); the novel The Female Barber (2005); and the book of essays Big Brothers of the World (2015).
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