Monroe Free Library

"The runaway bestseller that helped launch Korea's new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman's psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny. In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul, Kim Jiyoung-a millennial "everywoman"-spends her days caring for her infant daughter. Her husband, however, worries over a strange symptom that has recently appeared: Jiyoung has begun to impersonate...

"Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a "room salon," an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood. Her roomate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds...

Yewon dreams of a hotel. In the hotel, there are infinite keys to infinite rooms--and a quiet terror she is both eager to understand and desperate to escape. When Yewon wakes, she sees her life: a young woman, out of her job at a convenience store, trapped in the tiny South Korean village of her birth, watching her mother wash the bones of their ancestors in their decrepit bathtub. Every house has them, these rotting and fragmented ribs, tibias, and...

In 1984, Kim Song-hun was sent to South Korea to take the name "Kim Ki-yong" and spy for the North Korean government. He did this faithfully for many years, until his superior in North Korea was removed from office and his existence was forgotten. For the past ten years, he has been living in South Korea as a regular citizen. Now he has been remembered and receives an order to return to North Korea.

It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North's watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship....

"South Korea, 1970s: Sergeant First Class Cecil B. Harvey, a senior NCO in charge of 8th Army's classified documents, has long been a friend (willing or unwilling) to Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. So when he goes missing with a top-secret document that even a glance at could get an officer court-martialed, Sueño and Bascom take it upon themselves to find him. Meanwhile, Overseas Observer reporter Katie Byrd Worthington is back to make...

"When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter's definition of family is not one she can accept. Meanwhile, the nursing...