An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction.
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.
In the tradition of Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Drifting House is an unforgettable work by a gifted new writer.
About Krys Lee
Krys Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in California and Washington, and studied in the United States and England. She was a finalist for Best New American Voices, received a special mention in the 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, The Guardian, The New Statesman, andCondé Nast Traveller, UK (forthcoming). She lives in Seoul with intervals in San Francisco.
Editorial Reviews
“When reading the stories of debut author Krys Lee”s Drifting House, the simplicity and restraint of the writer come to the fore: declarative sentences, no fulsome descriptions despite the exotic locales of some of her stories. It is in this quiet confidence that the true strangeness and beauty of the work can emerge. . . . It is the cool telling that allows the tectonic plates of history, social forces and circumstances to move beneath these stories, conveying the feeling that something urgent and profound is at stake, beyond the lives of these striving, damaged and unforgettable characters.” —Marie Myung-Ok Lee, The San Francisco Chronicle
“However dark their fates might be, Lee blesses her characters with passions forged from the flames of suffering. The survivors of Drifting House are those who dare to find their salvation in small moments of beauty and connection, who have endured great losses, but pick themselves up and keep moving forward. . . . Drifting House reminds us of the illumination that comes from recognizing the shakiness of the ground under our feet. We tell ourselves that we are in control of our stories, but we never are. Lee’s survivors know the truth: Control isn’t possible. Once we accept that, we take our first, small steps toward grace.” —Heather Havrilesky, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Drifting House offers a rare look at how damaging politics takes a personal turn, undermining even what we are able to call home. . . . The greatest strength of these nine stories is Lee’s ability to locate them in the strange and brutal dimensions of lives distorted by dictatorship, exile, expatriation, and even hunger. Her stories also slide through the quiet violence of divorce, loneliness, parenthood, and erotic attraction. . . . Lee is a patient storyteller with a distanced, mostly omniscient point of view. Such a sweeping, plain-style narration is essential for lacing together a collection that unfolds in three countries. The even tone lifts these stories out of melodrama and turns them instead into pristine things that are as unsparing as they are compassionate.” —The Daily Beast
In ‘Drifting House’: Home Is Where The Hurt Is
NPR Book Review – February 20, 2012 (Excerpt)
If you can bear it, it pays to read the intense, disturbing stories in Krys Lee’s justly heralded debut collection, Drifting House, twice. The first time through, you’re liable to be so overwhelmed by grim details such as a severed arm in a kitchen sink or a homeless man desperately stabbing a would-be thief with metal chopsticks that you may miss the deep humanity underpinning Lee’s dark vision.
In nine haunting tales, this Korean-born author, educated in the United States and England and now living in Seoul, writes of the psychological fallout from Korea’s troubled history and the toll on families living in a fractured world.
Fiction about immigrants, Asian and otherwise, struggling to adapt to Western culture is a rich vein that has been well-mined by writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Ha Jin and Chang-rae Lee. Krys Lee’s focus, however, is less on cultural adaptation than on the disfiguring psychic scarring that unfathomable hardship, including war, repression and starvation, has left on her characters.
In the extreme emotional intensity and brutality of her family interactions, plus her political overtones and underlying feminism, Lee’s fiction evokes Maxine Hong Kingston’s groundbreaking 1975 book, The Woman Warrior, and Beijing-born Yiyun Li’s searing works about life under the Chinese dictatorship. [Read the full article...]
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We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
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