A Love Story from the End of the World
Stories
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for The Story Prize
From the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world
Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances.
With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim’s first story collection views our broken world—and broken hearts—from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human—but without nature, we are nothing at all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this delicate story collection from Kim (City of Night Birds), characters struggle to hold on to their sense of identity amid momentous changes. The protagonist of "Biodome," set in a future world racked by climate collapse, is responsible for monitoring the presence of toxic dust in his domed city. He feels unmoored in his life, like he's "being pushed by the crowd on a packed subway platform." In "Mountain, Island," the hopes of a child living on an island made of garbage are pinned on the slim chance of a popular boy band noticing his dance videos. The title story follows a marine biologist attempting to help an abandoned polar bear cub while grappling with the lingering trauma of her adoption from Korea by a white family in Idaho. The excellent "Older Sister" explores a young Korean American woman's devotion to her family, as she commits herself to her studies in hopes of earning enough money to take care of her parents after their store was destroyed in the Los Angeles riots. Throughout, Kim excels at revealing the far-reaching and destabilizing effects of traumatic events on her characters. Readers will savor these nuanced tales.
