River of Fire and Other Stories

Since her debut in 1968, O Chonghui has formed a powerful challenge to the patriarchal literary establishment in Korea. Her style has invited rich comparisons with the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf. Her early work, featured in this collection, offers compact, often chilling accounts of family dysfunction, reflecting the decline of traditional agrarian economics and the rise of urban, industrial living. Her later stories are expansive, weaving eloquent,...
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Since her debut in 1968, O Chonghui has formed a powerful challenge to the patriarchal literary establishment in Korea. Her style has invited rich comparisons with the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf. Her early work, featured in this collection, offers compact, often chilling accounts of family dysfunction, reflecting the decline of traditional agrarian economics and the rise of urban, industrial living. Her later stories are expansive, weaving eloquent, occasionally wistful thoughts on lost love and tradition together with provocative explorations of sexuality and gender. O Chonghui's narrators stand in for the average individual, struggling to cope with emotional rootlessness and a yearning for permanence in family and society. Arguably the first female Korean fiction writer to follow Woolf's dictum to do away with the egoless, self-sacrificing "angel in the house," O Chonghui is a crucial figure in modern Korean literature, one of the most astute observers of Korean society and the place of tradition within it.