Short Story Best
This list reflects the current public web novel response.
The Bachelor and the Maengkkongi
Kim Yu-jeong’s 1933 short story follows Deokman, a poor thirty-four-year-old bachelor in a drought-stricken farming village, as his hope for marriage collapses over one bitter night. Rural hardship, comic irony, dialect rhythm, and the cry of the maengkkongi shape a story that mixes laughter with pity.
Wings
Do you know 'a genius who has been turned into a stuffed specimen'? I am cheerful. At times like this, even love is cheerful.
A Traveler in the Mountain Village
Even though the night is deep, the drinker doesn't stop drinking. The room is eerie with a musty smell, like the smell of rising soybeans. Rats are squeaking in the closet. The single mother sits by the broken hearth and thinks forlornly. The already gloomy, twinkling light loses its shine as the wind blows in through the hole in the north gate. Plug the hole with an old beoseon pair. Then, he pulls the bowl under the lamp and picks up the needle without hesitation.
The History of a Walking Stick
In the morning, I heard the sound of a rooster crowing as proof that I woke up early, and when I think about it again, I wanted to return to the inn after the rooster started crowing - Oh, when I think about it again, I can't remember how I walked back from a town like Datmajang on a country road in the middle of the night without the moon because I was drinking, but I remember S snoring as the two of us walked.
Potato
Before Boknyeo and her husband came to the slums outside Chilseong Gate, a breeding ground of fights, adultery, murder, theft, begging, and prison, they had been farmers.
The Red Hills
The narrator recalls a journey through Manchuria, where he spent a year observing local customs and the illnesses among people untouched by modern civilization, and records what he saw in a small village called XX.
The Watermill
The water that clatters into the gutter and then pours out again lifts the heavy watermill and throws it down with a thud. The snorts of the laborers can be heard mesmerizingly in the mill where the white bran powder sits.
