A growing number of Koreans learn English, consume fast food and watch Hollywood movies regularly as in other places of the world, but the idea of what America really is still evokes, if anything, fuzziness.In "Rome, the Stolen Gem of America," author Choi Yong-sik attempts to draw up a clearer picture of America by identifying its cultural and historical link with ancient Rome.Choi shows how the present-day U.S. evolved from the Roman Republic since the Declaration of Independence in the 18th c

AngelopolisBy Danielle Trussoni(Viking)John Milton, the 17th-century writer and poet, is perhaps most responsible for giving Satan and his rebel angels celebrity status. In “Paradise Lost,” Milton imagines the fallen angels as “all monstrous, all prodigious things,” presenting them as the heroes of his epic work explaining humanity’s fall from grace and justifying “the ways of God to man.” From the novels in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series to films like “The Matrix,” Milton’s masterp

The Next Time You See MeBy Holly Goddard Jones (Touchstone Book)The small-town setting of “The Next Time You See Me,” Holly Goddard Jones’ debut novel, is no place for the faint of heart. The more we see of the people who live here, the easier it is to understand what one character means when he says it’s best to lay low and live “a small life, a sad life.”Especially if you’re different. Because Roma, Kentucky, circa 1993, is a place where cruelty is “the way of the world” and kindness “an anoma

In the official estimation of government economists, the Great Recession ended in 2009. But in Barbara Garson’s new book, it lives on. And for the people whose stories she tells, the Great Recession may never die.“They didn’t retire, and they didn’t find jobs,” Garson writes, describing the four New York professionals whose stories open “Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession.” They call themselves “The Pink Slip Club.” It’s a group that never loses any members, because n

Atlanta poet Collin Kelley was at a London gallery in 2010, taking in a retrospective of photographer Sally Mann, when he was gobsmacked by something in the Virginia-born artist’s otherworldly, black-and-white images. He saw eerie parallels to his own work ― the poetry he’d set aside years earlier to focus on writing fiction.He had a collection of poems that had been “kind of floating around” since 2008, enough for a book. He’d given it a couple of titles, combined different poems, changed the s

Celebrated Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto is writing a serial romance novel inspired by popular Korean actor and singer Lee Seung-gi, Lee’s local agency announced on Monday.The author, who has a large fan base in Korea for her previous works such as “Kitchen” and “Amrita,” has started writing the serial novel in six installments, featuring Lee as its protagonist. The novel will be published in Anan, a Japanese beauty and fashion magazine. The first installment will be published in its April 10

Korean author Ha Il-ji’s 2009 novel “The Republic of Uzupis” has been selected as one of the 12 best translated books of 2012 by Lithuania’s government-affiliated literary organization. A tale about a middle-aged man who wanders in search of an imaginary country, the novel was translated into Lithuanian by Korean translator Seo Jeon-seok with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea and published in Lithuania in 2012. “Filled with humor and mystique, the novel tells the story of

Lie Sang-bong explores what drives him with ‘Fashion is Passion’

Aleksandar Hemon landed in the United States two decades ago, January 1992. He was 27, a young Bosnian journalist from Sarajevo arriving on a one-month visa, arranged through a cultural exchange program sponsored by the State Department. Just after he arrived, war broke out in Yugoslavia. Hemon was stranded. In the years since, as he settled into this country and became an acclaimed writer ― one of Chicago’s finest contemporary writers and arguably its most important literary talent since Saul B

Middle CBy William H. Gass (Knopf)There’s an amusing and apt anecdote about William H. Gass, whose exhausting but also exhilarating new novel, “Middle C,” has just been published.During a 1978 debate, novelist John Gardner explained how he and Gass were different by stating that “my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.”Gass ― who loves metaphor and surely enjoyed this one ― was quick with his reply: “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have

The StorytellerBy Jodi Picoult (Atria/Emily Bestler Books)Jodi Picoult is a familiar name to those of us who race through the Hudson News stores at the airport just before we board a plane. We are smug in our certainty ― we know what we’re getting when we pluck one of her novels from the pile. Her prose goes down easy, and she fills her stories with characters confronted by moral quandaries and life-changing decisions.That’s certainly the case in “The Storyteller,” which opens with the narration

Kim Fowley came out of a Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore, the Hollywood of Kenneth Anger and Ed Wood. Best known for cooking up the Runaways, he began working in the music business in the late 1950s and since then has turned up in more places than Woody Allen’s Zelig, producing for Gene Vincent, writing with Warren Zevon and introducing John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band when they played Toronto in 1969.Fowley is now 73 and reportedly has been fighting bladder cancer, so it’s no surprise