Untold Night and Day | Bae Suah

Finishing her last shift at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind, Kim Ayami heads into the night with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. The following day, she looks after a visiting poet, a man who is not as he seems. Unfolding over a night and a day in the sweltering summer heat, their world's order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disorientating ways.

Untold Night and Day is a hallucinatory feat of storytelling from one of the most radical voices in contemporary Korean literature.

About the Author

Bae Suah was born in Seoul in 1965. After majoring in chemistry as an undergrad, she became a writer at the relatively late age of twenty-eight. Her first short story, which she wrote while learning how to type on a word processor, was published in a literary magazine. Prior to that, she had never taken any creative writing or literature classes. Highway with Green Apples, published in Korean in 1995 and published in the Day One journal in December 2013 in English, is one of her first works. She continued to publish over the years, and in 2001 she moved to Berlin, where she took a break from writing to learn German. In 2008, she began translating German literature into Korean, beginning with Martin Walser’s Angstblute. Suah has also translated two works by W. G. Sebald, one of her favorite German writers (Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht and Schwindel. Gefüehle, both forthcoming). She is also a fan of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa and is currently translating The Book of Disquiet.