NEW from Tamal Vista:

The Dog Thief
Short Stories by Chul-Woo Lim
Translated by Myung-Hee Kim

ISBN 0-917436-08-3
Price: $27.00
Hardcover
288 pages
Trim Size: 5.1”x 7.6”
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005906234

As a college student, Chul-Woo Lim witnessed the Kwangju Uprising during which hundreds of pro-democracy protesters were massacred by the South Korean government of Chun Doo Hwan. Lim’s desire to bear witness to this tragic event became one of the motivating forces behind his writing. One year after the massacre, Lim published his first short story, “The Dog Thief.”

Although the Kwangju Uprising and the Korean War form the backdrop for Lim’s works, his quirky and quixotic stories always transcend allegory. Often flirting with the absurd, they invite us into a world both tragic and comic, where ordinary people struggle to make sense out of the senseless, and to wrest meaning from chaos.

The Dog Thief, Chul-Woo Lim’s first collection of short stories, won the Korea Times creative writing prize, and his novella Red Chamber (1988) won the prestigious Yi Sang Literary Prize. His other published works include The South I Cherish (1985), Red Mountain and White Bird (1990), Starry Island (1991), Lighthouse (1993), Spring Days (five volumes, 1998), and One Hundred Year Old Motel (2003). He is currently a professor of creative writing at Hanshin University in South Korea.

Flowers Long for Stars
Poems by Oh Sae-Young

Translated by Clare You
and Richard Silberg

ISBN 0-917436-07-5
Price: $19.95
Paper
95 pages
Trim Size: 5.6”x 9”
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004115970

“This book of plainly riddling, elegiacally simple and beautiful poems is like nothing else you’ve ever read. In the fine translation of Richard Silberg and Clare You, this fine Korean poet reads better than most poets writing in English. Translation saves you from your contemporaries, wrote the great translator-poet of the San Francisco Renaissance, Kenneth Rexroth. If you want to be saved, read Oh Sae-Young, our great contemporary.” — Tony Barnstone

Oh Sae-Young is the author of eleven collections of poems, including Rebel Light, Unenlightened Love Songs, Burning Water, and Poems in America, as well as seventeen books of literary criticism.

Currently a professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University, Oh Sae-Young was a visiting professor from 1994 to 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley. His numerous honors and awards include the Nokwon Award (1984), the Kim So-wol Poetry Award (1987), and the Manhae Literary Award (2000). In addition to English, his poems have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and German.

what sound can penetrate the ear that has never heard the sick child's moan From "Small Song" in Traveler Maps

Traveler Maps
Poems by Ko Un

Translated by David R. McCann

ISBN 0-917436-06-7
Price: $25.95 $19.00
84 pages
Trim Size: 3"×4"
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003116298

One of present-day Korea's most revered and prolific writers, many followers of contemporary Korean literature believe Ko Un will be nominated for a Nobel Prize. Once a Buddhist monk, then a political dissident, and always a poet, Ko Un is "able to make the intensely personal into work having universal appeal and significance," writes David McCann, Harvard Professor of Korean Literature.

Translated into English by McCann, Ko Un's voice rings through the profound, intense, and often intensely funny poems in Traveler Maps. Long-time friends, McCann and Ko have been traveling together both literally and metaphorically for years. Having been to so many real and imagined places together, rather than "translating," Professor McCann often simply composes from his deep understanding of Ko Un and where he goes in his poetry. As a result, a reader gets an insightful representation of Ko Un's work as well as stunning English-language poetry.

Traveler Maps' design is based on a 17th-century book of maps used by Korean travelers - something put in their pockets to help find the way. Although the book is small, each of its sheets unfurls to present poems on large twelve-by-twelve inch pages. Traveler Maps is meant to unfold like the poems it contains, to be a collection of "maps" that guide a reader to some of the poetic places Ko Un visits. Hand-assembled and printed on 70 lb. felt text-stock, the book looks and feels like its 17th-century inspiration.

Benjamin Franklin Award winner, named Best Book of Poetry/ Literary Criticism 2005 by the Independent Book Publisher's Association.

Winner of the 2004-2005 Best Poetry Book, Northern California Publishers and Authors Association.