Description 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Han Kang On the miracle of continuing, against all odds, to live as a human being in this world The classic works of Han Kang, reborn Quietly tying knots along the road, drawing one deep line connecting three points Read the Han Kang of yesterday who made possible the Han Kang of today. This is the revised edition of the complete short story collections (three volumes in total) published to date by Han Kang, who began her literary career in 1993 when she published the poem "Winter in Seoul" and four other poems in the winter issue of the quarterly Munhak-gwa-Sahoe, and the following year won the Seoul Shinmun New Year's Literary Contest with her short story "The Red Anchor." Having received the Korean Novel Literature Award (1999), the Today's Young Artist Award (2000), the Yi Sang Literary Award (2005), the Dongni Literature Prize (2010), the Manhae Literature Prize (2014), the Hwang Sun-won Literature Award (2015), the International Booker Prize (2016), the Malaparte Literary Prize (2017), the Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award (2018), the San Clemente Literary Prize (2019), the Daesan Literary Award (2022), the Prix Médicis étranger (2023), the Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature (2024), and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2024), among others, Han Kang examines the solitude and pain at the root of human existence through prose that is both sturdy and delicate, resonating deeply with our times. Han Kang, the first Korean author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, has published three short story collections to date. Written over seventeen years, from 1995 to 2012, these three volumes were given new covers in 2018. Each book had once differed in color and format, and the project of bringing them together was like carefully connecting them along a single line. Her first short story collection—and her very first book overall—Love in Yeosu (1995), gathered short stories she wrote in a whirlwind over the course of a single year in her early twenties. Five years later, in her second collection, My Woman's Fruit, Han Kang seems to encounter "the plain truth that I myself am a process of change, like flowing water," only to ask once again, "Who was the person who wrote each of these stories?" (Author's Note). Twelve years later came her third collection, Salamander with Yellow Markings. In between, she wrote the novels Your Cold Hands, The Vegetarian, The Wind Blows, Go, and Greek Lessons. A short story is somewhat like the flame of a match. You strike it first, and watch over it with all your strength until it goes out. Those moments have pushed me forward with all their might. —"Author's Note" (2012), Salamander with Yellow Markings Only by looking back can one discover the trajectory. Over the course of publishing three short story collections, there are things that changed and things that remained the same in Han Kang's short fiction. In Love in Yeosu, isolated and solitary beings desperately reveal their longing for humanity and the world, leaving, abandoning, wandering, and falling. In My Woman's Fruit, these same beings, so desperately longing for the world, clumsily try to accept it and each other, only to fall out of step and be wounded. And by the time of Salamander with Yellow Markings, amid despair, the will to be reborn and the life force burn even more fiercely. Beings who have attained dignity still suffer, yet at last attempt to embrace one another. Somewhere they are destined to return to at last, a leaf pushing up its veins, a flower blooming during recovery—the natural change and flow that the project of "connecting the dots" sought to capture in full harmony with the photographic work of Lee Jung-jin used on the covers. What remains unchanged, perhaps, is Han Kang's fierce questioning. Never letting go of the questions "I want to live, I must live, how must I live," she asks throughout twenty-one stories about human existence, life and death, and this world, yet inevitably arrives at no answer. But that question itself, like a pale blue flame, along with the heat of solitude and the delicate sorrow that spring from it, becomes the very force that makes the characters within—and us—love and remain alive. Because things changed yet remained the same, the order of the stories was carefully rearranged and some expressions were revised, while what needed to stay was left untouched. To the author's own earlier question of "who" in My Woman's Fruit, we connect the newly written author's note from Salamander with Yellow Markings. We invite you to trace that trajectory together. Someone has been writing alone for over twenty years. Han Kang is still walking. She knows. The twelve years during which these stories were written can never come back again...