A Lucky Day and Other Stories

Read the Korean classics in Korean, with a new English translation on the same page.

A Seoul rickshaw man has the luckiest day of his working life, and cannot bring himself to go home to his sick wife. A stern dormitory matron confiscates every love letter her girls receive, until three students discover what she does with them at night. A farmer's daughter in a Pyongyang slum learns what poverty will make of her. These are the stories every Korean reads at school, written in the 1920s, the first great decade of modern Korean fiction.

This bilingual edition presents eight classic short stories by Hyun Jin-geon, Kim Dong-in and Na Do-hyang: A Lucky Day, Miss B and the Love Letters, Potatoes, A Society That Drives a Man to Drink, The Water Mill, A Poor Man's Wife, Baettaragi: The Boat Song, and Sonata of Mad Flames.

Each paragraph of the original Korean is followed by its English translation, so you can always find your place in either language. Sino-Korean words keep their hanja in brackets, as in Korean editions, and a word list for every story gives dictionary forms and meanings of the most useful vocabulary. The stories are arranged from shorter and easier to longer and harder.

Ideal for intermediate learners of Korean (around TOPIK 3-4), students of Korean literature, and anyone who wants to read beyond K-dramas into the stories that shaped modern Korea.