Pavane for a Dead Princess examines how contemporary Korea’s obsession with beauty is its popular culture’s newest canker.
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Following the relationship between a man with matinee-idol good looks and “the ugliest woman of the century,” Pavane for a Dead Princess examines how contemporary Korea’s obsession with beauty is its popular culture’s newest canker.
Both celebrated and condemned for his attacks upon what he perceives as the humorlessness of contemporary Korean literature, author Park Min-gyu uses a myriad of references to Western music and art, and the addition of a ‘writer’s cut,’ to suggest various ways of looking at his country’s extreme aesthetic fetishization.
“Min-gyu is ... one of the most popular writers of the 2000s, writing with a light touch and levity about not-too-light subjects . . . [yet] belongs to the tradition of modern Korean writers that consciously questions what it means to write literature.” —List
Park Min-gyu was born in South Korea in 1968 and published his first book, Legend of the World’s Superheroes, in 2003, for which he was awarded the Munhakdongne New Writer Award. He has since published four more novels, and numerous short stories.