Three Generations

"The novel, filled with gossip and family intrigue as scandalous as any contemporary soap opera, reads deliciously like a Dostoevsky novel or Les Liaisons Dangereuses meets Korea's traditional middle class."- KoreAm Magazine Three Generations charts the tensions in the Jo family in 1930s Japanese-occupied Seoul. One of Korea's most important works of fiction, Three Generations gave birth to naturalism in Korean literature and remains a mandatory read for Korean high school students.

Yom Sang-seop was born in 1897 in Seoul. In 1919, he participated in an independence movement against the Japanese,for which he was jailed. He published his first stories, Hakjigwang and Samgwang in the same year. In 1953, he received the Seoul Culture Award. He was also awarded the Asia Freedom Literature Award in 1956, as well as the National Academy ofArts’ Contribution Award in 1957. In 1962, he received the March 1st Culture Award and the Korean President’s Medal. He died in 1963.

Yu Young-nan’s translations include Pak Wan-so’s The Naked Tree (Cornell East Asia Series, 1995), Yi In-hwa’s Everlasting Empire (EastBridge, 2001), Yi Mu-young’s Farmers (Homa & Sekey, 2002), and HanSung-won’s Father and Son, co-translated by Julie Pickering (Homa & Sekey, 2002). She was awarded the prestigious Daesan Literature Award in 2002 for Everlasting Empire, and Father and Sonwas named a Kiriyama Pacific Rim Notable Book. Kim Chie-sou is a literary critic and a professor of French and Korean literature at Ewha Womans University. He received a doctorate from Université de Provence. His works include Space of Korean Fiction and Truth of Fiction.