Short stories
Original stories in Korean for each level, with comprehension questions. Tap any word to hear it, tap a dotted word to see its meaning, and listen to the whole story read aloud.
Beginner
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
마지막 삼각김밥
A tired office worker finds her usual late-night snack sold out at the convenience store.
2호선 한 바퀴
Hajun takes the subway across Seoul to a friend's birthday party and closes his eyes for a moment.
카페 키오스크
In a neighbourhood café with no staff, a young designer helps an older woman with the ordering machine.
위층 피아노
Doyun loves his new flat, except for the same simple song played badly upstairs every night.
휴대폰이 어디 있어요?
Late for work, Subin turns her flat upside down looking for her phone.
일요일 영상 통화
Every Sunday a couple video-call Haeun's mother, who still hasn't worked out where to point the camera.
두부의 비밀
Jiho's white cat keeps getting fatter even though Jiho feeds him less, so one Saturday he follows him outside.
영숙 씨의 첫날
A retired primary school teacher starts English classes at sixty-four, and her new teacher looks at her for a long time.
해운대 사진
For their fortieth anniversary, an older couple take the KTX to Busan with an old photo in their bag.
도어록 비밀번호
Jiu moves into her first studio flat in Seoul and sets a very difficult door code.
할머니의 감
Every autumn Jiwoo's grandmother sends her a box of persimmons from the countryside, but this year the box is late.
한라산은 어디에 있어요?
Haeun finally takes a holiday on Jeju to see Hallasan, but the weather has other plans.
미역국 열 그릇
Minjun decides to cook seaweed soup for his mother's birthday for the very first time.
첫눈
Two bank clerks in Chuncheon promise to have coffee on the day of the first snow, but the snow comes at three in the morning.
다람쥐와 도토리
A small fable: a squirrel hides hundreds of acorns in autumn and forgets where every one of them is.
민수 씨의 컵
An office worker in Icheon spends his Saturdays at a pottery class, trying to make one good cup.
운동 일기
An office worker keeps a diary of his first week at the gym.
선생님께
A young baker in Jeonju writes to her primary school teacher after twenty years.
아빠의 물고기
Every Saturday Hajun and his father go fishing, and every Saturday they come home with fish.
안나 씨의 첫 김장
Anna from Australia joins her Korean in-laws in the countryside near Haenam for her first day of kimchi-making.
Elementary
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
첫 회식
At her first team dinner, a new employee who can't drink is offered a glass of soju by her boss.
김지훈이 두 명
A young designer gets a very short message from the company president and spends the whole night fearing the worst.
잘못 간 떡볶이
Seoyeon orders spicy rice cakes late at night through a delivery app, but her food arrives somewhere else.
중고 밥솥
Taeyun sells an old rice cooker he has never used to a buyer who drives a hard bargain.
찜질방의 양머리
After a bad job interview, Soyun spends the evening alone at a bathhouse and meets a chatty stranger.
경주의 오래된 사진
Sua travels to Gyeongju with an old black-and-white photo of her grandmother, and her grandmother has one small question.
옥상의 범인
Ripe cherry tomatoes keep vanishing from Jaehyeon's rooftop garden in Gwangju, so he sets out to catch the thief.
커피가 나오셨습니다
A very polite café worker learns from a retired teacher that he has been honouring the coffee instead of the customers.
여섯 시의 눈치 게임
Nobody on the team wants to be the first to go home, until a new intern does something nobody expects.
사무실의 마니또
In the office's secret gift game, Yerin draws the name of the strictest manager in the company.
책 속의 메모
Harin finds a pencilled note in a library book and starts answering a stranger she has never seen.
할아버지의 팔순
The whole family gathers in an Andong village for Grandpa's eightieth birthday, but he only wants one present.
아빠의 전주
Somin takes her newly retired father on a trip to Jeonju, and he seems to know the city strangely well.
약국에서 만난 짝
With a bad cold on a Sunday, Taehyeon goes to the only open pharmacy and meets someone from his past.
엄마는 산을 잘 타요
Yuna takes her retired mother hiking on Bukhansan, worried that the climb will be too hard for her.
에밀리의 일기
A Canadian student keeps a diary of her first spring in a Seoul boarding house and its loud, kind landlady.
달팽이 우체부
A frog gives an important letter to the slowest animal in the forest, and everyone thinks he has made a mistake.
마지막 두 사람
In her first ten-kilometre race in Chuncheon, Naeun gets a cramp, and an old runner stops to help her.
해가 안 뜬 아침
Two old friends take the night train to Gangneung to watch the first sunrise of the year, and the sky has other plans.
스마트폰 교실
At a smartphone class for seniors in Daegu, one grandfather keeps asking the same question every single week.
Intermediate
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
불이 꺼진 면접
On the morning of his final job interview, the power goes out and Hyeonjun has to choose between being on time and helping a stranger.
전세 계약서와 반찬통
Gaeun moves into her first studio flat on a jeonse lease, then reads the news and starts to worry about her landlady.
밤 열 시의 발소리
Every night at ten, heavy footsteps start in the flat upstairs, and Seongjin finally writes a note.
새벽 세 시의 바나나우유
A night-shift worker at a Busan convenience store pays for a regular customer who has forgotten her wallet, and then the customer stops coming.
대구의 여름
A Seoul office worker is transferred to Daegu in July and has to survive the hottest summer of his life.
스무 살의 나에게
A thirty-five-year-old woman writes a letter to the twenty-year-old she used to be, studying alone for an exam in a tiny rented room.
사라진 택배의 범인
Parcels keep disappearing from a small apartment building in Mangwon-dong, and a quiet old lady on the ground floor offers to investigate.
매일 아침의 요구르트
Every morning a small bottle of yogurt appears on an office worker's desk with no note, and she sets out to find who is leaving it.
돌아온 냉장고
Daeun buys a secondhand fridge for her new studio flat through an app, and the seller turns out to know her room very well.
쉰여덟 살의 면접
After thirty years raising a family, Youngsook goes to her first-ever job interview at a café, where the young owner is even more nervous than she is.
엉뚱한 테이블
Soyeon sits down at the wrong table on a blind date, and the man sitting there doesn't tell her.
서로의 빈방
For their third anniversary, a woman in Seoul secretly flies to Berlin to surprise her boyfriend.
말을 세는 스피커
In 2034, a programmer who lives alone notices that his AI speaker has started telling him about the old woman next door.
7번 로봇
A designer who works from home keeps watching the same delivery robot get stuck outside her window, and decides to help.
아버지의 오리탕
After his father's death, Hyunwoo travels to Gwangju with an old photo to find the duck soup restaurant his father never stopped talking about.
할머니의 첫 이모티콘
A grandmother in Jeonju buys her first smartphone at seventy-five so she can keep in touch with her granddaughter, who is studying for an exam in Seoul.
마지막 배
A busy marketing manager plans a one-day trip to an island off the southern coast, but the wind has other plans.
번역기가 멈춘 날
In near-future Busan, a fishmonger and a Mexican researcher who talk through translation earphones lose the service on their hundredth day together.
잘못 찾아간 결혼식
A young man rushes into his university friend's wedding a little late, and ends up in someone else's wedding photo.
그 자리는 제 자리인데요
On a KTX to Busan, an elderly man is told he is sitting in someone else's seat, and the woman who owns it has a question about a letter.
바닥이 두꺼운 됫박
In a Joseon-era market, a rice seller with a secret trick meets a little girl who trusts him completely.
편지 쓰는 선비
A Joseon scholar fails the state exam for the third time and has to find a way to eat on the long walk home.
피곤한 산신령
The old tale of the honest woodcutter, told from the side of the mountain spirit who has to deal with what happens next.
폴대 없는 캠핑
Three office friends go camping by a mountain stream in Gangwon-do for the first time, and nothing goes to plan.
커피 두 잔
A woman opens a café in her small hometown, and an old man keeps ordering a cup of coffee that nobody drinks.
월말 평가
A day in the life of a K-pop trainee, on the day of the monthly evaluation that decides who stays.
반지가 사라졌다
Thirty minutes before his best friend's wedding, the groom's friend discovers that the rings have vanished.
할머니의 비밀 재료
When Grandma hurts her back before the family kimchi-making day in Jeonju, nobody can agree on her recipe.
숨
A worn-out Seoul office worker visits her grandmother, a Jeju sea diver, and is taken into the water.
윷놀이를 아는 척
On his first Chuseok visit to his girlfriend's family in Gyeongju, a nervous young man claims he is good at yutnori.
학원 버스의 마지막 손님
An exhausted high-school student always falls asleep on the academy bus home, until one night she wakes up early and sees what the driver is doing.
수능 날 아침의 오토바이
On the morning of Korea's national university entrance exam, a police officer meets a crying student standing outside the wrong school.
3번 테이블 할아버지
A family that runs a small noodle restaurant misses the quiet old man who came every Tuesday, until a stranger arrives with a notebook.
춘천의 첫 겨울
An Australian exchange student faces her first real winter in Chuncheon and misunderstands her landlady's advice.
주인 없는 도시락
A KTX attendant finds a packed lunch with a note from a mother and sets out to find the son it belongs to.
초보 엄마의 일기
In her diary, a new mother records the sleepless first months with her baby daughter and an unexpected gift from her own mother.
단톡방 대참사
A young office worker makes fun of his manager's tie in a message to a friend and sends it to the wrong chat.
새벽 축구회의 새 회원
A neighbourhood football club of middle-aged men in Incheon gets an unexpected new player: a sixty-year-old woman.
폐교의 불빛
In a small country village, children whisper that a closed-down school is haunted, and a newcomer goes at night to see for herself.
이십 년 늦은 편지
A retired postman in Gyeongju sets out to deliver a love letter that got lost twenty years ago.
Upper-intermediate
Short stories
36 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
스타트업의 마지막 한 달
A small Seongsu startup that connects lonely elderly people with university students has one month of money left, and its founder tries everything to save it.
월요일까지의 시간
A quality inspector at a food company in Daegu finds that her own mentor changed a test result, and gives him until Monday to act.
팀장님 지키기
A worn-out team leader at a Yeouido insurance firm keeps forgetting things, yet her error-filled reports keep reaching the boss perfectly corrected.
너무 완벽한 온도 기록
A customs inspector at Busan's Gamcheon port grows suspicious of a frozen squid container whose paperwork is a little too perfect.
귤밭에서 온 답장
Three years after a bitter fight over their late father's tangerine orchard, a sister in Seoul writes to her brother on Jeju, and he finally writes back.
신발을 돌려놓는 손님
A couple buy a century-old hanok in Jeonju to turn into a guesthouse, and every morning someone has rearranged their shoes.
남항의 늙은 선장
A retired fishing captain in Busan gets a call saying his son has been arrested, and decides to play along.
저는 여기까지 하겠습니다
At a Friday team dinner in Euljiro, a new employee politely declines the karaoke second round, and a mid-career manager waits for the explosion.
노란 스카프
At her twenty-fifth high school reunion in Cheongju, a divorced woman goes looking for the boy who left an unsigned note in her locker.
수요일의 짜장면
A separating couple rehearse for months how to tell their ten-year-old son, and the conversation does not go as planned.
열네 살 차이
A fifty-one-year-old accounting manager and a younger colleague bond over old songs during late nights at the office, until the gossip starts.
세 번째 방문
In 2041, Seoyeong goes to a memory-editing clinic in Gangnam to erase her ex-boyfriend, and the technician has something to show her first.
오백 원짜리 동전
In a near-future Seoul where cash is banned, a young district official is sent to shut down a fish-bread stall that still takes coins.
배 안의 이름
A woman remembers growing up in Ulsan in the 1980s as the daughter of a quiet shipyard welder, and learns his secret decades later.
비카스의 일 년
A Nepali university student spends his first year as a worker in a furniture factory in Pocheon, where the gruff foreman is hard to read.
공짜 점심은 없다
A widower in Gwangju is pushed by his daughter into a speed-dating event for over-sixties, and he only goes for the free lunch.
마을 방송은 계속된다
In a mountain village of grandmothers near Hamyang, the care robot that runs the village loudspeaker is about to be taken away.
고추밭의 새벽
A Seoul couple quit their jobs to grow chilli peppers in a Chungcheong village, where the neighbours seem to want nothing to do with them.
아버지의 죽방렴
After her father dies, an accountant from Seoul spends one season working his bamboo anchovy weir off Namhae before deciding whether to sell it.
한 글자의 무게
In thirteenth-century Goryeo, a young apprentice carving the Buddhist scriptures into woodblocks makes a mistake that nobody has seen.
꼴찌 팀의 일 년
A father keeps a diary of the baseball season in which he takes his ten-year-old daughter to watch the worst team in the league.
쉰 살의 운전석
After the family restaurant closes, a woman in Daegu sets out at fifty to become a city bus driver, much to her teenage son's alarm.
기일 아침
On the tenth anniversary of Grandpa's death, the family gathers for the memorial rite, and Seoyun's mother has been cooking for three days.
학생 한 명을 태우는 배
When the ferry company plans to cut the morning boat from a tiny island off Yeosu, its only schoolgirl may have to leave.
측우기를 지킨 아전
In a drought in fifteenth-century Joseon, a county clerk who records the rainfall is asked by his kind magistrate to change one number.
예순두 살 막내 이장
A retired manager moves to a village in South Jeolla for a quiet life and is elected village head because, at sixty-two, he is the youngest man there.
일흔세 통의 편지
A granddaughter in Sokcho learns why her grandfather, separated from his sister in 1950, has never agreed to leave his small refugee village.
새벽 두 시의 순서
On a busy Friday night in a Daejeon emergency room, a nurse deals with an angry man who says he has waited too long.
종로의 외상 장부
On the last night before her Jongno street stall closes for good, the owner tries to cancel all her regulars' unpaid tabs.
동인천에서 송도까지
A sixteen-year-old in Incheon has told her classmates she lives in Songdo, and a school video project threatens to give her away.
갓생 관리 앱
A young office worker decides to live the perfect productive life and downloads five apps to help him do it.
벽 너머의 노크
In a tiny Noryangjin study room, a man preparing for the civil service exam starts talking to his unseen neighbour by knocking on the wall.
일곱 번째 배심원
Chosen as a juror in a citizens' jury trial, an office worker notices one small detail in the photos of a very simple case.
마감 십 분 전
Ten minutes before deadline at a Gwangju newspaper, a young reporter's editor wants a headline that every other outlet is already running.
세어 줘서 고마워
In 2045, one of the last human census workers is sent to a mountain village where the electricity bill doesn't match the number of residents.
3번 구덩이의 항아리
At a dig in Gyeongju, a graduate student finds a modern coin in a pit that should be 1,300 years old and fears months of work are ruined.
Nonfiction
4 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
우리 집 아파트는 나보다 성실하다
A columnist complains, half joking, that his Seoul apartment earns more than he does, until the market turns.
Opinion column
청약과 로또, 하나로 합친다
A satirical news report: a made-up government agency decides that since winning a Seoul apartment is harder than winning the lottery, the two should simply be merged.
Satire
요즘 애들이라는 말
A fifty-four-year-old manager at a Daejeon factory writes about why he has stopped saying kids these days.
Opinion column
정이라는 말
A translator tries to explain a Korean word she has never managed to put into English.
Essay
Advanced
Short stories
36 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
벽 너머의 기침
A night-shift warehouse worker in a tiny Sillim-dong rooming house has never seen his neighbour's face, only heard his cough every morning, until one morning the cough stops.
세 권의 장부
Sent home to Daegu to close the family fabric shop in Seomun Market, a Seoul designer finds three account books kept by three generations of women.
1407호의 의자
An accountant who can't sleep without pills hears a chair scrape in the empty officetel next door at exactly three every morning.
느린 사람
The day after quitting her job, a woman sets off on the long ridge walk across Jirisan with a schedule timed to the minute, and gets stuck behind a very slow old man.
두 줄짜리 정정 보도
A young online reporter is told to publish a viral video accusing a soup restaurant of reusing leftovers within thirty minutes, and she notices something odd in the footage.
법인카드의 행방
Three weeks into his first job, a new employee is told the team's company card has gone missing after Friday's dinner, and his name is the last one in the log.
두루미를 세는 사람
A data analyst goes home to Suncheon to confront her father, a retired maths teacher whose phone calls are all about the cranes he counts every winter morning.
유성까지 이십 분
A young founder rehearses his investor pitch aloud in a Daejeon taxi, and the driver interrupts with one simple question.
제물포에서 온 시계
In 1888, a young porter at the newly opened port of Jemulpo is paid ten times his usual fee to carry a mysterious ticking box to Hanyang on his back.
마지막 그네
In a near-future Seoul with almost no children, an ageing playground inspector finds a little girl on a swing he has been oiling for nobody.
짜장면 배달가
Told in the manner of a pansori singer: on a stormy night, Seoul's fastest delivery rider must get one bowl of black-bean noodles across the river in twenty minutes.
소나무 아래 개미
A retired forger who runs a framing shop in Insadong is asked to authenticate a painting, and recognises the tiny mark he once hid in it.
삼월에 내린 눈
Through letters passed on by an adoption agency, a woman raised in Minnesota and the mother who gave her up in Cheongju slowly find their way to each other.
백팔 배
A retired construction executive is sent on a temple stay in the Gangwon mountains by his daughter, and the monk who guides him is someone he once let go.
표준어로 읽어 주세요
A Seoul researcher goes to a mountain village in South Gyeongsang to record older speakers for a voice assistant, and her first speaker refuses to read the script.
전체 회신
A missing container of homemade kimchi sets off an ever-politer email war between two departments, and the list of people copied in keeps growing.
현상되지 않은 필름
A young man brings his late mother's camera to an old photo studio in Gunsan to develop the film left inside, and the owner recognises the camera.
당직 의사 한 명
At two in the morning, the only internist at a county hospital in the mountains of Gangwon-do gets a heart-attack patient she cannot treat there.
산복도로의 열대야
In the Busan of 2041, a young heatwave patrol officer climbs the hillside stairs every night to persuade a stubborn old sailor to sleep in a cooling shelter.
별이 떨어진 밤
On the night a Seoul restaurant guide is announced, a chef who has just lost his star gets an unexpected visit from his oldest rival.
돌반지
A woman remembers the winter of 1997, when her father's company went under and her mother took the family's gold to the bank.
목격자 진술서
A woman writes a careful statement to the police about a hit-and-run she saw on a rainy night in Ilsan, and adds one or two details too many.
끈 하나
A former sprinter who never made the national team becomes the guide runner for a blind athlete, and their first national final does not go to plan.
의자의 승진
An office fable: when a company's new attendance system ranks a salesman's empty chair as its best employee, the management takes the result very seriously.
홍어 한 접시
In a Mokpo fish market, a widowed stallholder notices that the retired Seoul banker who buys fermented skate from her every day never seems to eat it.
대행 하객
A woman who is paid to pose as a guest at strangers' weddings is booked as the bride's best university friend, and the bride keeps looking at her.
마지막 주심
After machines take over calling balls and strikes in professional baseball, a veteran umpire finds a new job in an amateur Sunday league where everyone argues with him.
삭다
A translator preparing an anthology for a London publisher gets stuck on the last word of a short poem by a fishmonger-poet from Suncheon.
서울말 공책
A woman from North Korea who works in a bakery in Nowon is asked to train a new employee from Daegu.
새벽 두 시의 빈소
On the last night of their father's three-day funeral in Daejeon, three siblings open his bankbooks to pay the bill and find something none of them expected.
외상 장부
On the last day of the only bookshop in a shrinking mining town in Taebaek, a middle-aged man comes in with an envelope and a confession.
제가 쓴 문장입니다
While everyone in his job-hunting study group lets an app write their cover letters, a final-year student insists on writing his own.
흔들지 않은 소리
A gayageum player injures the hand that gives the instrument its trembling voice, and her old teacher gives her a strange exercise.
같은 강
On their usual bench by the Han River, a retired taxi driver tells his old friend he will stop visiting his wife, who no longer recognises him.
칠번 국도의 끝
After his father is diagnosed with early dementia, a divorced son drives him up the east coast road the old truck driver knows by heart.
사과문_최종_진짜최종
When a chicken chain's giant wings turn out to be ordinary size, a PR assistant manager writes an apology that every level of the company then revises.
Nonfiction
4 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
숟가락 하나
Helping their mother pack up the family kitchen before a move, the narrator remembers a grandmother who laid one spoon too many at every meal.
Essay
강아지 유치원의 입학 원서
A newspaper columnist takes his mongrel to a dog kindergarten in Daechi-dong and finds a box on the form asking which university the owner went to.
Opinion column
등을 맡기는 곳
An essay on the closing of a neighbourhood bathhouse in Busan's Yeongdo, and on the one part of the body nobody can wash alone.
Essay
우산을 두고 내리는 사람들
A worker at a Seoul subway lost-property office reflects on the umbrellas nobody comes back for, and the one that somebody did.
Essay
Mastery
Short stories
36 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
사랑방의 독자
In a nobleman's house in 1880s Seoul, a stern old minister orders his son-in-law to find out who is writing the scandalous novel passing around the women's quarters.
아빠의 아재 개그
A daughter who has groaned at her father's puns all her life sits with him in hospital the night before his stomach surgery.
삼천 원어치 꼬막
A young man from Seoul goes to the market in Suncheon to repay a fifty-year-old debt from his late grandfather's notebook, and the cockle seller has a story to tell.
지하 주차장의 가수
A post on an apartment community board asks who is singing in the underground car park every midnight, and the comments take over.
밤과 밤 사이
A translator preparing an English anthology of women poets of the Joseon era cannot find a way to carry one pun across (the sijo in this chapter is an original poem written for the course).
십이 장에서 죽지 않겠습니다
A crime novelist plans to kill off his detective in chapter twelve, and finds lines in his manuscript that he did not write.
마지막 변사
In 1935 Gyeongseong, the most famous silent-film narrator of a Jongno cinema gives his last performance before the talkies arrive.
유언장 제7조
Three siblings who haven't spoken for seven years meet at a lawyer's office in Daejeon to hear their mother's will, which has an unusual clause.
은젓가락이 검어진 저녁
In a Joseon palace kitchen, a veteran royal cook is accused of poisoning the king's supper when the taster's silver chopsticks turn black.
문어와 피자
At their father's first memorial rite in a Pohang fishing town, his children fight in thick Gyeongsang dialect over what belongs on the offering table.
새벽 한 시 십칠 분
A woman in a Mangwon-dong studio flat lies awake from one in the morning until dawn, and her thoughts keep circling back to something she did yesterday.
마리안 소만의 말뚝
A glaciologist wintering at King Sejong Station in Antarctica goes looking for a marker her late father left at the edge of the ice thirty years ago.
밭담 앞의 두 사람
A graduate student goes to the small island of Gapado to record the last two fluent speakers of its old Jeju speech, who have not spoken to each other in forty years.
마지막 반집
In his televised retirement game against a teenage prodigy, an old baduk master plays a move the AI win-rate graph says is a blunder.
새출발 피시방
In 1998, after the financial crisis costs him his bank job, a forty-six-year-old manager opens an internet café in Sillim-dong without knowing anything about games.
공룡능선의 하룻밤
A mountain rescuer in Seoraksan spends a windy December night on a ridge with an injured seventy-two-year-old hiker who told his wife he was going to the bathhouse.
묻지 않은 질문
A court-appointed lawyer in Seoul defends a delivery rider accused of a hit-and-run, and the only witness swears she heard him shout.
기본형 할머니
In 2039 a young woman pays a company to rebuild her late grandmother's voice from years of phone calls, and then the voice says something new.
두 개의 서울
A man who was ten in the Olympic summer of 1988 goes back to the apartment block his father helped build, and finds it rebuilt behind a glass door.
별점 다섯 개의 장례식장
The MBA son of a Daejeon funeral-hall owner brings customer surveys and star ratings to the family business, with darkly comic results.
암자의 와이파이
The founder of a struggling meditation app spends three days at a mountain hermitage, pitching his product to an old monk who answers in riddles.
명절 방어 세트, 지금 주문하세요
A live home-shopping show sells a kit of ready-made answers to relatives' nosy holiday questions, until a mother phones in.
찍지 않은 사진
In a fragment of her memoir, a retired war correspondent remembers a boy selling water at a checkpoint who asked her to take his picture.
거꾸로 박힌 활자
Digitising newspapers from the 1970s, an archivist finds a typo the software wants to correct, and takes it to her grandfather, who once set type by hand.
간판 고치는 선생님
A retired Korean teacher in Gangneung corrects every misspelt shop sign in his neighbourhood, until a young chicken-shop owner argues back.
시장에서 부른 소리
A prize-winning young pansori singer goes to an old master in Namwon, who sends her to sing to a waterfall for a hundred days and then somewhere harder.
재단 초크로 쓴 글자
In 1972 a fifteen-year-old girl from the countryside goes to work in a cramped garment workshop by the Cheonggyecheon, where the seamstress beside her has an unusual use for tailor's chalk.
김포에 내리는 비
The script of one episode of a 1966 live radio serial, in which a miner bound for West Germany waits at the airport, and the director's notes in the margins tell a second story.
이름을 고치러 온 사람
An old name-maker in Sinchon, used to choosing names for babies, is visited by a woman of forty-eight who wants to replace the name her parents gave her.
새벽 네 시의 경매장
A retired detective who now drives a forklift at a Busan fish market notices that one young bidder keeps winning the same box at very odd prices.
아파트 단지 단톡방의 인류학적 고찰
A mock academic paper studies the residents' group chat of a large apartment complex as if it were a tribe, with rituals, taboos and a chief.
공가
Three days before an old public apartment block is demolished, a woman checks every empty flat and sprays a red mark on each door, until one flat seems to know her.
여백의 연쇄 법칙
A student buys a secondhand calculus textbook for five thousand won and finds that two earlier readers once shared it, and wrote far more than calculus in its margins.
초랭이의 입
A burnt-out Seoul office worker becomes an apprentice in the Hahoe mask dance in Andong and is cast as the cheeky servant who mocks the aristocrats, a part he cannot seem to play.
옥이네 순댓국 방문자 리뷰
Thirteen years of online reviews of a small blood-sausage soup shop near Songjeong Station in Gwangju tell the story of its sharp-tongued owner, her son, and her customers.
안녕히 계세요
On the last day of her thirty-one years teaching Korean to foreigners in Seoul, a teacher plans to end her final class with the very first lesson she ever taught.
Nonfiction
4 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
가로등 민원 처리 결과 알림
An old man asks his district office to fix one broken streetlight, and the office answers him in a growing pile of official letters.
Satire
그리움에 대하여
When her seven-year-old niece asks what the word for longing means, a woman from Gangneung goes looking for the answer in her own life.
Essay
말뚝이, 건물주 나리를 모시다
A mask-dance scene in which the cheeky servant Malttugi helps a building-owning gentleman raise the rent, until the gentleman's own son wants to open a café.
Mask-dance play
곶감의 정체
The old tale of the tiger who fears a dried persimmon, retold for grown-ups as a story about power, rumour and fear.
Fable