by Krys Lee
The Viking Press 2012
Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee’s stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.
In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants’ unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter. (Publisher’s description.)
Although born and currently living in Seoul, South Korea, Krys Lee spent much of her childhood in California and Washington, and even stayed a while in England. This year she recieved a special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In 2006 she was included in a short list of finalists for the Best New American Voices. Krys Lee is truly a product of our globalized society as her writing truly reflects the pain, and sometimes the beauty, that migrates with people across borders, into new homes, away from painful pasts.
