Today’s GalleyCrush is Juhea Kim’s Beasts of a Little Land, forthcoming from Ecco on December 7, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “An epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter.”
First lines: “The sky was white and the earth was black, like at the beginning of time before the first sunrise. Clouds left their realm and descended so low that they seemed to touch the ground. Giant pines loomed in and out of the ether. Nothing stirred or made a sound.”
Book buzz: “Juhea Kim’s sweeping debut is pure reading pleasure. Rapturous, ravishing, and gorgeously rendered, Beasts of a Little Land is a portal to a whole world teeming with life, so full of wonders I wanted it never to end.” —Catherine Chung
Cover credit: Tiger © Jasmijn Solange Evans; landscape courtesy of the National Palace Museum of Korea; design by Allison Saltzman.
Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 416 pages.
Author bio: Juhea Kim was born in Incheon, Korea, and moved to Portland, Oregon, at age nine. Her writing has been published in Granta, Catapult, Joyland, the Times Literary Supplement, the Independent, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor of Peaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She earned her BA in art and archaeology from Princeton University. After a decade in New York City, Kim now lives with her two rescue cats in Portland, Oregon.
