Eugenia Kim's Blog

• Stories Change Lives

  November 17, 2009

  • The North Korean capture and Clinton-assisted release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee brought a compelling human element into a conflict that many Americans know little about. I’m a Korean-American novelist who also paid scant attention to the North Korean regime until Ling and Lee’s 140-day arrest brought the cloistered dictatorship to national consciousness once again. After the two ...
  • Continue Reading » 2 Comments

• Jazz and Keyboards

  October 23, 2009

  • Last night my son and I went to a DC jazz club to hear the band Slumgum, whose pianist is the son of a friend. The musicians on tenor sax (Jon Armstrong), piano (Rory Cowal), bass (David Tranchina) and drums (Trevor Anderies) produced a vital and exciting mix of jazz, improv and contemporary classical music. As I watched and listened to these four young men (they appear to be in their mid-to-late ...
  • Continue Reading » 0 Comments

• Five Pages by a Fruit Bowl

  October 17, 2009

  • Colm Tóibín gave a short presentation earlier this year at the bookstore Politics & Prose, preceding his reading of the novel, Brooklyn. Among the memorable statements he made was this: he’d forbidden his writing students to use flashback. Though Tóibín has written eloquently about the inspiration for this novel, the remonstration to his students was partly what influenced him to write ...
  • Continue Reading » 0 Comments