My American K-Drama


Book Description

Alyssa Ryan has the perfect Southern California life. She’s the top of her class, has a cute boyfriend, and surfs in her spare time. When her parents decide to send her to Seoul, South Korea to spend her senior year as a special foreign admissions student at a private school in the Gangnam neighborhood, Alyssa’s perfect world crumbles. Feeling diminished from this turn of events, Alyssa secretly disguises her identity at her new school much to the consternation of Cha Jun Seo and Kim Hyun Jun two handsome Korean boys whose worlds start to orbit her own. Just when Alyssa thinks she has her life comfortably figured out, a tragic past shared by the two boys threatens to upend Alyssa’s first love and future. @myamericankdrama




The Rise of K-Dramas


Book Description

Korean dramas gained popularity across Asia in the late 1990s, and their global fandom continues to grow. Despite cultural differences, non-Asian audiences find "K-dramas" appealing. They range from historical melodrama and romantic comedy to action, horror, sci-fi and thriller. Devotees pursue an immersive fandom, consuming Korean food, fashion and music, learning Korean to better understand their favorite shows, and travelling to Korea for firsthand experiences. This collection of new essays focuses on the cultural impact of K-drama and its fandom, and on the transformation of identities in the context of regional and global dynamics. Contributors discuss such popular series as Boys over Flowers, My Love from the Star and Descendants of the Sun.




The Red Palace


Book Description

June Hur, critically acclaimed author of The Silence of Bones and The Forest of Stolen Girls, returns with The Red Palace—a third evocative, atmospheric historical mystery perfect for fans of Courtney Summers and Kerri Maniscalco. To enter the palace means to walk a path stained in blood... Joseon (Korea), 1758. There are few options available to illegitimate daughters in the capital city, but through hard work and study, eighteen-year-old Hyeon has earned a position as a palace nurse. All she wants is to keep her head down, do a good job, and perhaps finally win her estranged father's approval. But Hyeon is suddenly thrust into the dark and dangerous world of court politics when someone murders four women in a single night, and the prime suspect is Hyeon's closest friend and mentor. Determined to prove her beloved teacher's innocence, Hyeon launches her own secret investigation. In her hunt for the truth, she encounters Eojin, a young police inspector also searching for the killer. When evidence begins to point to the Crown Prince himself as the murderer, Hyeon and Eojin must work together to search the darkest corners of the palace to uncover the deadly secrets behind the bloodshed. Praise for The Red Palace: An ABA Indie Bestseller A Junior Library Guild Selection Forbes Most Anticipated Book of 2022 Selection "A tense political thriller, a beautiful romance, and a coming of age all in one unique package." —School Library Journal, starred review "This atmospheric historical mystery will transport and captivate readers ... A beautifully written story full of historical and cultural details that will leave readers aching for a follow-up." —Booklist, starred review "An expertly choreographed mystery with a touch of romance and an emotionally satisfying conclusion ... The perfect book to curl up with for a cozy winter afternoon of murder and intrigue." —NPR




K-Drama School


Book Description

From the Emmy Award-winning Squid Game to streaming sensations like The Glory and Crash Landing on You, Korean television has emerged onto the global pop culture scene as compelling television—but what exactly makes these shows so irresistibly bingeable? And what can we learn about our societies and ourselves from watching them? From stand-up comedian and media studies PhD Grace Jung comes a rollicking deep dive into the cultural significance of Korean television. K-Drama School analyzes everything from common tropes like amnesia and slapping to conspicuous product placements of Subway sandwiches and coffee; to representations of disability, race and gender; to what Korea's war-torn history says about South Korea’s media output and the stories being told on screen. With chapters organized by "lessons," each one inquiring into a different theme of Korean television, K-Drama School offers a groundbreaking exploration into this singular form of entertainment, from an author who writes with humor and heart about shows that spur tears and laughter, keeping us glued to the TV while making fans of us all. Shows discussed include: Squid Game, SKY Castle, Crash Course in Romance, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, My Mister, Something in the Rain, One Spring Night, DP, Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, Autumn in My Heart, Winter Sonata, Our Blues, and more.




Who Ate Up All the Shinga?


Book Description

Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that "no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean." But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park's idyll, complicating her day-to-day life. With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park's portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses.




Shine


Book Description

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Kim confronts the dark underbelly of the K-pop world as she strives to become a K-pop star.




How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life


Book Description

Discover the power of how K-Dramas can improve your wellbeing and provide a sense of belonging Love K-Dramas and want more permission to binge watch them? In How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life: Powerful Lessons on Belongingness, Healing, and Mental Health, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Jeanie Y. Chang explores what K-Dramas can teach us about our own well-being and how we can use the lessons they teach us to live better and more meaningful lives. She also touches upon the powerful interrelationship between K-dramas, mental health, and belongingness. Topics covered include: Using K-Dramas as a roadmap to life, showing you how to navigate speed bumps, roadblocks, twists, turns, and dead ends Building cross-cultural relationships that you otherwise may not have without being a K-Drama fan Processing grief from the loss of a loved one to a loss of anything—a job, your physical safety, a relationship, or something else Harnessing the idea of Jeong, which is innate in Korean society and refers to the emotional sentiment of affinity, affection, kinship, and connection which is the thread throughout Jeanie's community Working the author’s trademarked mental health framework, Cultural Confidence®, to build up your mental health, identity, mindfulness, and resilience For K-Drama fans and enthusiasts and anyone curious about the influence of pop culture, How K-Dramas Can Transform Your Life is an entertaining and educational must-read on how this enormously popular global phenomenon can help us become the best versions of ourselves.




Second-Generation Korean Americans and Transnational Media


Book Description

Second-Generation Korean Americans and Transnational Media: Diasporic Identifications looks at the relationship between second-generation Korean Americans and Korean popular culture. Specifically looking at Korean films, celebrities, and popular media, David C. Oh combines intrapersonal processes of identification with social identities to understand how these individuals use Korean popular culture to define authenticity and construct group difference and hierarchy. Oh highlights new findings on the ways these Korean Americans construct themselves within their youth communities. This work is a comprehensive examination of second-generation Korean American ethnic identity, reception of transnational media, and social uses of transnational media.




Crying in H Mart


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.




Review and Analysis of Crash Landing on You


Book Description

Wondering what made this Korean drama a global sensation? Or why multitudes have watched and have not moved on?This book offers a dissection of how refined each details of the series and how grand these all came together to give us a truly masterpiece of series. Ever wonder if you really understood the ending alright? This piece provides an analysis of exactly what was shown to us, frame by frame, of the beautiful finale ending scenes.Missing Captain Ri? Don't fret - we've got 100 ways he made our hearts flutter so much! Relive the kilig.Crash Landing On You made viewers completely disregard the spoken language barrier and made us all cry and laugh while reading subtitles. If this is not amazing, I don't know what is!