100 books like The Birth of Korean Cool

The novel One Left begins when the elderly protagonist hears a TV report on the last surviving Korean “comfort woman.” She is in fact also a comfort station survivor, one who has remained silent and hence unknown to the public. At the age of thirteen, she was kidnapped into a Japanese military comfort station in northeast China. The protagonist's thoughts flash back and forth between her present-day life and the wartime horrors, the details of which are drawn from  real survivors’ testimonies. “Fifteen men a day was normal,” she recalls, “but on Sunday fifty men or more might come and go from a girl.” “If a girl got pregnant, her uterus was removed fetus and all as a preventive measure.” It is a difficult read, but necessary, moving, and profound. 

In the neo-Confucian society of Chosŏn Korea, women were the keepers of the inner quarters and were discouraged from pursuing literacy and education. Such gender-role expectations have persisted so strongly in modern Korea that only in recent decades have women fiction writers achieved parity with their male counterparts. We are fortunate to know, or have known, almost all the writers represented in this anthology and to share their creative vision.

In The Guest we hear the voices of the victims of a massacre that took place shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, a massacre blamed on the UN (mostly American) military but actually perpetrated by Koreans on Koreans. To allow us access to the stories of these victims the author uses a ritual in which a practitioner of native Korean spirituality channels the voices of those who have died an unnatural or premature death and who continue to wander in the ether until they are able to communicate their stories to those of us still living. Only then can they find closure and settle in the hereafter.

The Long Season of Rain (the title refers to the monsoons that afflict the Korean Peninsula at the start of summer) reminds us that in Hell Chosŏn women remain subservient to men in almost every sphere of society, and learn early on to endure silently instead of speaking out. This novel exemplifies the richness of Korean-American young-adult novels, which often focus on coming of age and the quest for identity. Especially poignant is the author’s use of a naïve narrator, the daughter of a woman who learns that her husband has taken a concubine.

This is an accessible account of history through the lens of how “mistakes were made,” and how most of us aren’t told about them.

It is plain old-fashioned great fun to read about blunders in the worlds of business, sports, pop culture, even some of America’s epic military failures (so long as they happened long ago!). A great corrective to claims that the US is uniquely blessed with perfection.

Where the Girls Are is about a particular generation of women growing up in post War America, and the impact popular media had on their lives, both for good and for bad. It weaves wonderfully smart, often funny, always engagingly written discussions of pop music, movies, and television shows with Douglas’s own experiences at the time. It’s unabashedly feminist—but it isn’t a speech or a political manifesto. It’s an exploration of the push-pull of growing up female at a transitional time, a time in which attitudes toward women were changing, unevenly, and how pop culture reflected the tensions of the times. This book is history, memoir, sociology, media studies, all at once – immensely informative and very entertaining.

Originally published in 1978, I was still a bit young to be devouring such dark and twisted tales but this one became my own blueprint for writing short stories.

This wasn't my first SK book, I had previously read his other novels like Salem's Lot and The Stand. But once I discovered Night Shift, it was like getting a different story each and every time I opened the book. 

There are no 'favorites' here because each one is sublime, but if I were forced to select 2-3 out of the 20, I'd go with "Gray Matter", "The Mangler", and "Sometimes They Come Back", mostly because these have quotes that I still see and use here and there, some 40 years later.

I find WASP culture absurd and fascinating. I love that rich people, really rich people, have a fixation with stickers, slapping abbreviations for Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket or East Hampton on their luxury vehicles even though said luxury vehicles, parked in said locales, really should say it all. Such is the taxonomy writ large in Lisa Birnbach’s seminal Preppy Handbook, which explores other WASP signifiers such as “the politics of monogramming,” the elevation of old clothes over new, and what your choice of private schools, charities and vacation spots says about you. Pairs well with Take Ivy, a cult photography book by the Japanese photographer T. Hayashida, who spent the early-to-mid 1960s photographing American preps on college campuses — with prep soon becoming the rage in the Japan’s hipster Ginza district.

Londoner Tina Brown alights in New York City and falls fast and hard for power-playing, the machinations of billionaires and politicos, the trappings of glamour and wealth and the city itself, whose rococo sensibility she brings to Vanity Fair, a magazine she rescues from irrelevance and turns into a monthly-must read. Brown generated national headlines with her high-low sensibility and indelible cover images (a naked and pregnant Demi Moore scandalized middle America, much to Brown’s delight). She also writes about her guilt as a working mother, the thrill of matching the right journalist to the right story, and her trepidation in fighting for the salary she knew she deserved. A witty and colorful document of the last moment magazines really mattered.

Getting back to the fluffy–and the steamy–I’m not a huge holiday romance reader but this was delicious!

A plus-sized adult film star accidentally getting cast in a squeaky clean Christmas movie and her co-star is an ex-boy band bad boy trying to rehab his image? *chef’s kiss* Add in the fact that they're fans of each other’s work? Perfection.

I felt that the characters being huge fans of each other helped offset the sometimes parasocial power dynamic of a fan dating/banging a star they’ve idolized for years. That plus them both needing to keep Bee’s porn career a secret put them on even ground, which allowed me to really enjoy their delightful banter, chemistry, and hot sex scenes.