My Very Last Possession and Other Stories (And Other Stories by Pak Wanso) - First edition

This is an anthology of ten short stories by one of Korea's foremost living writers. The literary world of Pak Wanso depicts the trials of the Korean War and the subsequent three decades of upheaval during which Korea was transformed from an agricultural to an urban industrial society, in the process casting off a repressive military dictatorship and becoming a modern, if troubled, democracy. Pak affords a searching woman's perspective on radical changes in Korean family structures and social values that have unfolded in the course of the country's wrenching transformations. Exposing the cruelty and hypocrisy of Korea's Confucian traditions, which have subjugated women for centuries, her realistic prose also insightfully analyzes the dehumanizing impacts of the capitalist market order that characterizes Korea today.Without succumbing to overly simplistic nostalgia for the past, Pak leads her readers to grasp the moral ambiguities and to question the injustices that prevail in the more impersonal and often alienated society presently emerging in a "globalized" Korea.