Swell
-
- Pre-Order
-
- Expected 9 Jun 2026
-
- 9,49 €
-
- Pre-Order
-
- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
Each story in Swell launches from the common but pivotal moments that determine the course of everyday life, but they’re often filtered through the perspective of someone else: documentarians, novelists, storytellers, gossips. Then, as the stories build atop one another and intertwine, they begin to shift and destabilize. Characters return but their histories are changed, alternate timelines open, and no one is ever who they were.
Like an optical illusion this book offers two complete pictures. Viewed as individual stories, contemporary Korean lives are rendered with sensitivity and realism—relationships tatter and bereaved loved-ones search for ways to move on. Viewed as a complete collection, though, a stranger narrative emerges, in which there is perhaps some invisible logic behind everything, incomprehensible to us. Wholly original, Swell, translated by Janet Hong, is a book full of trap doors, hidden passageways, and the unsolvable mystery behind everyday life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In one tale from this marvelous collection by Son (Hot Air Balloon), skillfully translated by Hong, pitcher Babe Ruth becomes a movie star instead of a Hall of Famer. The excellent "Give Them the Lindy Hop" is framed as a journalist's exposé about a lost film by Korean director Gil Gwang-Young. "The Love of a Scientist," another standout, centers on physicist Gordon Gould, who, instead of inventing the laser as he did in real life, discovers infinitesimal pockets where gravity ceases to exist. Here, Son cleverly inserts a version of herself, with the conceit that the story is a translation by her of an English-language magazine article. Son excels at presenting fiction as biography, crafting narratives that feel revelatory and uncannily plausible, and she ingeniously blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction to illuminate the fragile relationships between parents, children, friends, and lovers. Throughout, Son addresses questions of self-perception and self-delusion and exposes the distortions that comprise human self-regard. It's a revelatory work about the stories people tell themselves.
