From Interpretation to Communication: Dreaming of Becoming a Global LeaderBy Choi Jung-wha (HUEBOOKs)Choi Jung-wha, president of Corea Image Communication Institute, has written a new book “From Interpretation to Communication: Dreaming of Becoming a Global Leader.”The book presents life and career tips for aspiring interpreters and professionals. The professor-interpreter also teaches at the Korean-French department of the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University o

March 7, 2013

The StorytellerBy Jodi Picoult (Emily Bestler Books/Atria)Sage Singer, the protagonist of Jodi Picoult’s ambitious 20th novel, “The Storyteller,” is a physically and emotionally scarred young woman working as a baker in a small New Hampshire town. She avoids human contact, interacting only with the wise former nun who owns the bakery and a married undertaker with whom she is having an affair.Her quiet existence is shaken, though, when she befriends Josef Weber, an elderly German who frequents th

March 7, 2013

“The Romanov Cross’’By Robert Masello (Bantam)Army epidemiologist Frank Slater does the right thing ― and is court-martialed for his actions ― in Robert Masello’s latest novel, “The Romanov Cross.’’ During sentencing, Slater is stripped of his military credentials and pay. Surprisingly, he’s given no jail time, but he soon learns why.His expertise is needed in Alaska, where a burial site containing victims of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has begun to erode. The exposed bodies might contain the

March 7, 2013

Don Causey was beginning to plan his retirement, selling off his profitable sporting newsletters, when his life took a horrific turn. While on a safari on a long-anticipated trip to Africa, a tree tumbled onto him, breaking his back. The process of getting a medical transport to take him from a remote village back to Miami proved arduous and costly.Today Causey’s back is healed, and at 70 he finds himself in a post-retirement career ― consulting for a company that sells travel memberships that i

March 7, 2013

There’s a subtle arc to Jim Gavin’s first book, “Middle Men” (Simon & Schuster). Gathering seven stories largely set in Southern California, it opens with a high school basketball player and ends with Marty Costello, a plumbing supply salesman who “averages 50,000 miles per year, vast territories, circles of latitude, Inglewood to Barstow, sailing across SoCal, all day every day.”In between, we meet men of different ages, from Costello’s adult son Matt, also trying to make it in the plumbing sup

March 7, 2013

Kim Eun-ho, the head of local publishing house Hangilsa Publishing, has been appointed as the new chairman of Bookcity Culture Foundation, the organization said.Kim, who graduated from ChungAng University, worked as a reporter for major local daily Dong-A Ilbo from 1968 to 1975. He founded his publishing house Hangilsa Publishing in 1976, and has served a number of significant positions in the publishing industry ever since. In 2011, he served as the head of the Paju BookSori Festival’s organizi

March 5, 2013

What a conversation it was.The Book of Job. Hippos. The road life. The writer’s life (which, more and more these days, is the road life). Philly. Iowa. Rutgers. Bryn Mawr. Florida. Kafka. Dorothy Day. George Saunders (more on him later). Sharing an apartment with your sister. A bumper-car arcade of ideas and language.Such is an hour of talk with writer Karen Russell, sitting around her apartment near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sparkling notion-eruptions and prismed, faceted phrases. Her 201

Feb. 21, 2013

PhantomBy Jo Nesbø(Knopf)I once suggested that some Nordic crime novels are Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins with enough mildly leftist musing thrown in to make readers feel intellectually respectable. One reply to that comment put it this way:“It’s why I think ‘Downton Abbey’ does so well in this country, too. It’s basically an absurdly trashy soap opera, a notch or two down from the magnificent ‘Days of Our Lives,’ but because it’s on PBS and they’re speaking with English accents, it’s somehow

Feb. 21, 2013

The One I Left BehindBy Jennifer McMahon (Wm. Morrow)Jennifer McMahon’s novels share a common link ― expert plotting complemented with a real feel for the complicated nature of relationships, feelings and what motivates a person’s actions.The Vermont-based author continues that high standard in her fifth novel. “The One I Left Behind” works well as a mesmerizing psychological thriller, as a look at how childhood trauma can forever scar an adult and as a testament to the power that the past and h

Feb. 21, 2013

Nora Guthrie had put off reading her late father Woody Guthrie’s recently unearthed novel, “House of Earth,” even after she’d agreed for it to be published. Having devoted much of 2012 to preparing events and projects surrounding the centennial of the singer-songwriter-artist’s birth, she said, she wanted to read the book at her leisure, when it wouldn’t feel like “work.”So it wasn’t until last fall that she started in on the manuscript’s pages and soon reached the lengthy, graphic sex scene in

Feb. 21, 2013

Revenge: Eleven Dark TalesBy Yoko Ogawa(Picador)Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow has some company in Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa, whose “Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales” is a storehouse of creepy and vicious behavior from otherwise normal-seeming people.In her books that have been translated into English so far, Ogawa has shown a propensity for characters in the grip of obsessions, be they the benign mathematical fixation of the brain-injured scholar in “The Professor and the

Feb. 14, 2013

Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Writers on How and Why They Do What They DoEdited by Meredith Maran (Plume)Joan Didion had it right. In her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” originally published in the New York Times Book Review, she lays out the template in no uncertain terms: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjun

Feb. 14, 2013

Today’s Incheon International Airport boasts great size and spacious duty-free shops, but things were quite different just 40-some years ago. Local reporter Lee Hwang’s latest book, “Airport Reportage,” chronicles the history of local airports, from the very first one on Yeouido, Seoul, to the one in Incheon today. Throughout his 40-year career as a journalist, Lee covered events that took place in airports, witnessing countless historic moments. Lee joined local daily Hankook Ilbo in 1970 and

Feb. 14, 2013

English literature professor Kim Seong-kon, who is also director of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, has been elected president of the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (SUNY Buffalo) Alumni Association of Korea.Kim, who received his Ph.D. in English from the university, has been teaching at Seoul National University. He was appointed the director of LTI Korea in 2012. In the same year, he received the International Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mat

Feb. 5, 2013

Nearly five months after he almost died in a plane crash on San Juan Island, author Richard Bach has returned to what he knows best ― the inspirational tale of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.The 76-year-old author and longtime pilot is recovering at his Orcas Island home after spending four months in a Seattle hospital with massive brain, chest and spine injuries. Bach says his recovery includes rediscovering simple pleasures, like walking and talking with ease and carving the Christmas turkey.He c

Jan. 31, 2013

The LaughterhouseBy Paul Cleave(Atria)“The Laughterhouse,” the sixth novel by New Zealand crime writer Paul Cleave, offers a disgraced cop at economic loose ends, a multiple murderer who dispatches his victims in extravagant ways, and chapters narrated from inside the killer’s head.That’s not the freshest recipe in the crime fiction cookbook, but “The Laughterhouse” nonetheless held my attention. Its story is, a back-cover blurb tells me, one of revenge, survival, and impossible choices, and tha

Jan. 31, 2013