Frank Carlson Library

Skye Shin has heard it all. Fat girls shouldn't dance. Wear bright colors. Shouldn't call attention to themselves. But Skye dreams of joining the glittering world of K-Pop, and to do that, she's about to break all the rules that society, the media, and even her own mother, have set for girls like her. She'll challenge thousands of other performers in an internationally televised competition looking for the next K-pop star, and she'll do it better...

"Candace Park knows a lot about playing a role. For most of her life, she's been playing the role of the quiet Korean girl who takes all AP classes and plays a classical instrument, keeping her dreams of stardom--and her obsession with SLK, K-pop's top boyband--to herself. She doesn't see how a regular girl like her could possibly become one of those K-pop goddesses she sees on YouTube. Even though she can sing. Like, really sing. So when Candace...

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Kim confronts the dark underbelly of the K-pop world as she strives to become a K-pop star. Six years ago Korean American Rachel Kim was recruited by DB Entertainment, one of Seoul's largest K-pop labels. The rules are simple: Train 24/7. Be perfect. Don't date. Now, as the dark scandals of an industry bent on controlling and commodifying beautiful girls begin to bubble up, Rachel wonders if she is strong enough to be a...

"Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a 'room salon', an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood. Her roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds...

Wanting to follow in the footsteps of her free-diving haenyeo grandmother, a young Korean girl dutifully consumes her grandmother's strength-building abalone porridge and practices her breath control before suiting up and overcoming fears to make remarkable discoveries.

Now that Girls Forever is the number-one K-pop group in the world, Rachel Kim is famous and happy, but when she meets Alex she considers breaking the rules of fame to fall in love. Rachel Kim is at the top of her game: Girls Forever is now the number-one K-pop group in the world, and her viral airport styling attracts the attention of fashion's biggest names. The only thing that's missing is love, but in this world, falling in love can cost you everything....

These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the Korean War. Lost Souls echoes the exceptional work of China's Shen Congwen and Japan's Kawabata Yasunari....