Shokos Smile, Choi Eunyoung
Shokos Smile, Choi Eunyoung
List: $17.50 | Sale: $12.25
Club: $8.75

Shoko's Smile
Stories

Author: Choi Eunyoung, Sung Ryu

Narrator: Jackie Chung, Janet Song, Greta Jung

Unabridged: 7 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 06/01/2021


Synopsis

A bestselling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers.

In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In "A Song from Afar," a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, traveling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In "Secret," the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother.
In the tradition of Sally Rooney, Banana Yoshimoto, and Marilynne Robinson--writers from different cultures who all take an unvarnished look at human relationships and the female experience--Choi Eunyoung is a writer to watch.

About The Author

Choi Eunyoung is a South Korean writer acclaimed for her nuanced yet poignant stories about women, queer people, victims of state violence, and other marginalized voices. She is the author of the bestselling story collections Shoko's Smile and Someone Who Can't Hurt Me, which have sold over 200,000 copies and 150,000 copies respectively in Korea and is being translated into several languages. Since her literary debut in 2013, she has received numerous accolades, including the Munhakdongne Young Writers Award (2014, 2017, 2020), Heo Kyun Literary Award, Lee Haejo Literary Award, and Hankook Ilbo Literary Award. Both of her story collections were selected as the best fiction title of the year by 50 Korean writers (2016, 2018). She has also published a Korean-English bilingual edition of her novella The Summer and contributed to many anthologies. Sung Ryu is a Korean-English translator who grew up in South Korea, the US, and Canada, her most recent home being Singapore. Her translations include Tower by Bae Myung-hoon (2021), I'm Waiting for You: And Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young (co-translated with Sophie Bowman, 2021), and the Korean edition of Grandma Moses: My Life's History by Anna Mary Robertson Moses (2017). She translated the Jeju myth "Segyeong Bonpuri" (Origins of the Harvest Deities) for her MA thesis.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Reading_ on January 19, 2025

"Is being a woman really that embarassing and painful? Women are emotional, disruptive, selfish, and therefore more likely to betray the organization; a woman's enemy is another woman. Is that sort of self-denial the healthiness you talk of?" I love the writing. I feel the translation is well done. I......more

Goodreads review by emma on March 05, 2022

This book is not even 300 pages long, and there are like 7 stories in it, and every single one of them hits like a novel. That's pretty cool. Even cooler is that the first 5 stories are excellent - the aforementioned novel-level punch (which sounds like a delicious beverage), beautiful writing, brilli......more

Goodreads review by aly on January 10, 2024

Shoko's Smile is a collection of compelling short stories illustrating the growth and shattering of women's relationships and intimacies through time; presented with reality, seriousness, and moral rectitude. From Shoko's Smile to The Secret, all of these stories depict the connections that formed w......more

Goodreads review by el on July 26, 2023

astounded by the emotional depth of a short story collection so unembellished, so uncluttered, but also so unbearably human. there's so much empathy written into choi eunyoung's worlds—endless swaths of it. it was an honest pleasure to get to sit with these stories and characters for a short while.......more

Goodreads review by sree on March 07, 2022

i need 3-4 business years to recover from this......more