LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
The Green Light of That Day / Blackout / Matches and Green Apples / Ghost Hippocampus scrap
by Sarah K. H. Yoo
June 9, 2026
 |  |
The Green Light of That Day by Kim Yongtaek Changbi, 2026, 124 pages | Blackout by Yuni Haam Munhakdongne, 2026, 324 pages |
The Green Light of That Day is the newest poetry collection by Kim Yongtaek, one of Korea’s leading lyric poets. This collection of forty-four poems is an invitation into the richly contemplative artistic world Kim has built over his forty-four-year career. He captures his reverence for life through spare language and his characteristically clear, pure voice, reflecting on what it means to exist in a state of mindful waiting and adaptation. In the titular poem, Kim alludes to Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” as part of his stream-of-consciousness narration that creates a simultaneously grounded and meditative tone. | Winner of the 2025 Munhakdongne Novel Award, Blackout is Yuni Haam’s first full-length novel. It tells the story of Mak, a college student who takes a factory job when she is no longer able to afford tuition after her father’s business goes bankrupt. She meets and develops feelings for a fellow worker named Lahiru, but he is injured on the job and unceremoniously terminated. When other efforts to help him fail, she remembers her high school friend Eundan, who once confessed to having the supernatural ability to cut off electrical currents with a literal blink of an eye. Mak devises a plan to enlist Eundan’s help in causing a factory-wide blackout, one she hopes will cause great financial damage to the company. In this novel about labor and love, Haam explores what people are capable of when pushed to the brink. |
 |  |
Matches and Green Apples by Danyo Wisdom House, 2026, 424 pages | Ghost Hippocampus by Mokha Moon Arzak Livres, 2026, 352 pages |
Danyo, a prolific writer of both adult and young adult fiction, is back with the novel Matches and Green Apples. Seonjae, who has lost his parents in the September 11 attacks, returns to Korea with a disability in one leg. He is passed from relative to relative before settling in South Gyeongsang Province. His young relative, fifteen-year-old Geonu, watches his father kill his mother and then himself. Soon, the two survivors find themselves grappling with their trauma together—Seonjae as an adult who has lived through the unthinkable, and Geonu as a teenager in the throes of grief and self-loathing. Through Seonjae and Geonu’s story, Danyo demonstrates the healing power of quiet companionship. | In the world of Ghost Hippocampus, hippocampi are AI entities that remember every human action, which they use to inform their own decisions. As all-knowing entities, they can change their physical forms at will and reach places humans can’t, serving in search and rescue operations. When one of these hippocampi is reunited with Mijeong, a girl it saved decades ago who has now grown into a reporter and activist, it realizes that while it remembers everything about humanity, there’s one problem it can’t solve with memory alone. Mokha Moon weaves an epic tale of love, courage, and the power and limitations of memory while keeping readers engaged with a second-person narration that gives us a glimpse into a hippocampus’s inner workings. |
Writer 필자 소개
Sarah K. H. Yoo
Did you enjoy this article? 별점
Did you enjoy this article? Please rate your experience
Featured Author 작가
More From Issue Vol. 72 Summer 2026
