Snowy Day and Other Stories

By: Lee Chang-dong, Yoosup Chang - translator, Heinz Insu Fenkl - translator

Narrated by: Intae Kim, Jennifer Yun, Earl T. Kim, Keong Sim, Jennifer Kim, Greta Jung, Raymond J Lee, Greg Chun, Heinz Insu Fenkl

“Vivid . . . These stories, in which class divisions form impassable rifts and submission to the status quo comes at great psychic cost, have much to say about our contemporary reality."—The New York Times Book Review

“What a gift to have these stories translated, finally, into English!”—Ari Aster, director of Midsommar and Hereditary

The first story collection published in English by Lee Chang-dong, one of South Korea’s most celebrated and influential literary and cinematic figures

Much like Lee Chang-dong’s internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally published in Korea in the 1980s and now translated into English for the first time, investigate themes of injustice, betrayal, and terror—on both an intimate and national scale. Lee writes deeply and hauntingly about conflicts between family, the powerful and the vulnerable, conformists and rebels.

In the title story, drawn from the author’s own memories of serving in the South Korean military, the class divide between a university-educated private and a working-class corporal serving sentry duty together one snowy night leads to tragic consequences. In “There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon,” the psychological violence that two brothers enact on each other over the course of a lifetime captures the darkness and paranoia that pervaded Korea in the 1980s, as the country struggled toward democratic rule. And in the novella-length “A Lamp in the Sky,” a young woman’s brutal interrogation at the hands of the police reveals the series of increasingly troubling decisions that led her to this moment. Is she innocent or guilty? In the end, even she cannot say.

Snowy Day and Other Stories introduces English listeners to a master storyteller.

©2025 Chang-dong Lee (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Before Lee Chang-dong became an internationally celebrated director of unflinching, complex films that examine the injustices embedded in Korean society, he explored these same themes in fiction . . . The vivid, realist stories . . . in which class divisions form impassable rifts and submission to the status quo comes at great psychic cost, have much to say about our contemporary reality.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The[se] stories have a suffocating suspense, with no one being allowed to fully move forward with their lives—there’s invariably a knock on the door or a phone ringing to question and rewrite the past. It’s a mark of Lee’s skill that these stories leave you, like the characters, unable to look away while instinctively wanting to escape.”—Finanical Times

“Breathtaking . . . Readers already familiar with Lee's uncanny ability to create precise yet multilayered film imagery will detect that impressive skill in these pages . . . That recognition, that empathy, should turn aficionados of Lee's films into literary admirers, deservedly expanding his international presence.”—Shelf Awareness