Contemporary Korean American novelists are hard at work imagining and publishing absorbing, thought-provoking literature. This post features five new and recent novels by Korean American authors that showcase breathtaking aesthetic ingenuity and timely political interventions. As you’re putting together your fall reading lists, consider adding these compelling books to your to-read lists. 

Everyone Was Falling by J.S. Lee

J.S. Lee’s novel Everyone Was Falling is set in Bixby, a small, mostly white US town. The novel is set in motion when on July 4th, 2016, a mass shooting at a twentieth high school reunion kills fifty-six people. Three survive.

Lee’s novel follows the three survivors of the shooting as they navigate their PTSD in their hometown. The three were friends in high school, but their paths diverged in adulthood. Lucy is a queer Korean American adoptee. Donna is the only Black alumna of their high school’s graduating class. Christy is a white woman YouTube personality. After the shooting, the three women are brought together again.

As Lee explains in an interview with the Washington Independent Review of Books, one of her goals while writing the book was to

convey how race, sexuality, religion, and status affect the ways people process the same trauma — along with the cumulative effect of battling things both inside and out. Society doesn’t allow much space to understand the complexities of intersecting marginalization, or the compounded traumas that people of color frequently experience.

Lee explores these complicated mechanics of trauma through detailed studies of the novel’s characters. She shows how their different identities force them to contend with trauma in dissimilar ways, making it clear that there is no trauma that is not also aggravated by systemic oppressions.

Lucy—the primary focus of the novel—negotiates this terrain as a confident and courageous character. Throughout the novel, she deploys her sharp wit to confront the exhausting microaggressions as well as the blatantly racist and homophobic comments that assail her in Bixby. 

As it works through themes like intersectional oppressions, trauma, and resilience, Everyone Was Falling is an incisive and sensitive novel that takes on American culture on the verge of Trump’s election.

Angel & Hannah: A Novel in Verse by Ishle Yi Park

“Pssst. Ven acá. Illuwah. / Let me whisper you a story,” beckons the alluring opening of Ishle Yi Park’s novel. Follow the call to discover a spellbinding world built of music and magic that swirls around two young lovers making their way through New York City in the ‘90s.

When the two sixteen-year-olds Hannah and Angel meet at a quinceañera, they kindle a forbidden love that hearkens back to Romeo and Juliet. Hannah is a Korean American girl from Queens, and Angel is a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn. Once they fall in love, they struggle with their families and the world around them to stay together. The novel is told in four parts named after the four seasons, but the story follows Angel and Hannah’s relationship and trials over the course of several years. 

Park’s language in Angel & Hannah is richly textured and stunningly beautiful. The novel is told through individual poems of different forms, and each of these packages of enchantment sing with lyrical finesse to resonate with the greater narrative. Park notes in an event with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that lyric forms in the novel bring together hip hop bars, Petrarchan sonnets, Elizabethan sonnets, Spenserian sonnets, and free-verse poems.

Park—a poet, singer, and the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York—has an expert ear for the musicality of language. In Angel & Hannah, she mixes the vernacular languages, rhythms, and harmonies of New York City into a lush novel that explores love, race, and poverty.

Reprieve by James Han Mattson

In James Han Mattson’s newest novel Reprieve, the author introduces us to the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room located in the “cornfield spookiness” just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1997, four contestants team up with the hopes of winning the house’s grand prize of $60,000. All they have to do is complete the challenges in six rooms without shouting the safe word “reprieve.”

Though the team does make it to the last room as they endure the macabre, fake-blood-spattered antics of the house’s creepy actors, one of the contestants ends up brutally murdered by a man who breaks into the house. 

Through courtroom transcripts and the personal stories of three very different narrators, the novel explores the lives of those involved with the murder both before and after the tragedy. We hear from Kendra Brown, a Black teenage girl who’s recently moved to the predominantly white area from DC, Leonard Grandton, an entitled white man whose toxic, misogynistic behaviors we observe in both the US and Thailand, and Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay Thai international student who has followed his former English teacher to the US.

While engaging with the tropes of the horror and thriller genres, Mattson’s novel also critically deals with race, gender, sexuality, and their intersections through themes like racial fetishism, sex tourism, and complicity with white supremacy. Though the horrors of the Quigley House are nightmarish and invasive, what is truly horrifying in Reprieve is the greater world outside its walls.

Imagine a Death by Janice Lee

Janice Lee’s novel Imagine a Death is a phantasmagorical work that encompasses the stories of three main characters—a writer, a photographer, and an old man. Each of these characters is grieving the loss of a loved one in an apocalyptic world. While ambient crises threaten to foreclose their futures, past trauma and abuse haunt the characters in the present.

What might first strike the reader of Lee’s novel are her gorgeous meandering sentences. Eileen R. Tabios’s review notes that these can span entire paragraphs as they flow among striking imagery, contemplative meditations, and expressive metaphors pushed beyond their limits.

Within the currents of these protracted streams of consciousness, time and space fold into themselves, revealing unexpected and thought-provoking metonymic relationships among disparate elements. “What I love about long sentences is the ability to get lost,” notes the author in an interview with X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, “and I think this is important. The opportunity to get lost once in a while.”

Perhaps it’s the individualized human subject who gets lost in Imagine a Death, as the novel blurs the lines between the individual and the universe through its evocations of social complicity and ecological entanglement. In the novel, there is no individual apart from its relations to others, and this solvent perspective makes room for the non-human voices of animals and plants as they supplement the novel’s human dramas.

With a dreamy prosaic style and a malleable, interpenetrative perspective on the world, Imagine a Death is a work that can get you to slow down and savor the process of reading as it deals intuitively with art, violence, and the end of the world.

Search History by Eugene Lim

As is evident from its starred reviews from both Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, Search History—Eugene Lim’s fourth novel—defies easy categorization and summation. Within the novel, there is a plotline involving a dog who a character suspects is the reincarnation of his friend. Nevertheless, the very idea of a linear, concrete plot seems to be undermined by the narratological choreography and witty commentaries that propel and refract the novel’s “profound and casually bonkers” narrative.

“The experience of reading this novel is wonderfully digressive,” writes Katie Yee in her glowing review on Lit Hub, and she notes that Lim’s novel thematizes artificial intelligence, Asian American identity, aesthetics, and loss into its sprawling hyper- and metatextual web. 

Reviewers of Search History also pick up on homages to Jorge Luis Borges, César Aira, W.G. Sebald, and David Byrne in the work. Yee specifically cites “[t]he basement food court of forking paths” from the novel as a recognizable landmark from NYC Chinatown. This reference brings familiarity to the novel’s labyrinthine reading experience even as it appears to humorously allude to Borges’s monumental work of world literature, “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Noted for its agile formal innovations, emotional depth, and shrewd humor, the highly anticipated Search History is a novel that you’ll probably just have to pick up for yourself to go along for the ride and experience all that goes on inside.