Folk Tales from Korea

By Zŏng In-Sŏb

Book Overview

This is one of those books that has great appeal to the reading public at large. While the scholar will be able to collect further information from the detailed introduction and the carefully... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0930878264
• ISBN13: 9780930878269
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Hollym International Corporation
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

A rare find, but very good!

I love his book! It's so hard to find books on Korea that don't talk about the 20th-century war, but that talk about its culture. There are a lot of tale sin the book, plus a great index. Each tale has a heading telling you its origin (Buddhism, for example). I definitely recommend this book if you are interested in Korea!

A Treasure Chest of Korean Stories

I'm Korean-American with a Korean mother, and when I was little, I remember her telling me some crazy stories. They were like the fairy tales I heard in school (I grew up entirely in the US), except they had odd characters doing odd things. At least they seemed odd at the time. In my late twenties, I was browsing through a bookstore in Berkeley that specializes in Asian subjects, and I found this book. I immediately remembered one story that really stuck-out in my memory: one about a frog who ultimately repented for lying to his mother but it was too late and her body wound up floating down a river because of his lies. Like I said, the stories seemed weird at the time :) But sure enough, the story was in the book! Right then and there, I decided to buy it and I read through it pretty quickly. The author traveled all over Korea, noting the origin and year he recorded each story, and the result is a wonderful collection of myths, fables, and fairy tales. If you know Korean culture, you will recognize the uniquely-Korean aspects of many of the stories. If you don't know Korean culture, it may be an unusual but intriguing experience. Instead of princesses, witches, dragons, and the like - here it's filial sons, righteous magistrates, goblins, tigers, rabbits and toads. I enjoyed the book so much, I bought copies for my brother and my mother, so we could all have these stories to read to our children (and grandchildren). I highly recommend them.