even with the dimmest light

Even with a very faint light

Some people only walk with me for a short while, but the light they leave shines throughout the rest of my life.
Features award-winning works from the 2020 "Young Writers Award"
Yes24, Aladin's 2023 Book of the Year (Korean online bookstores)
The latest work by Choi Eun-young, author of Douban's 2023 Book of the Year, "Bright Night"
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In a light so faint they could only see each other, they once clung to each other with such sincerity.
— "Why do women report to the police, want a divorce, yet still can't escape violence?"
"No, the wife must kill her husband to survive."
— "Does Father know how immensely destructive casual words from parents can be to young children?"
"Every moment she wanted to protect me, she seemed so afraid, always needing to muster courage."
— "Don't lose your own voice by being controlled by others' words."
"I hope you become someone who doesn't laugh if you don't want to laugh."
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"Even with the Faintest Light" is Choi Eun-young's latest collection of short stories, comprising seven works. The stories center on women, focusing on the intense, enduring, and resilient complex relationships between them. With gentle and fresh prose, it captures the violence and resistance that lie hidden beneath calm surfaces, often ignored. The women in the stories fight similar destinies, becoming each other's support, steadfastly engaging in mutual rescue and uplift within the many cages that seek to oppress and imprison them—
The female teacher in "Even with the Faintest Light" who helps a menstruating female student by offering her own clothes, the senior female colleague and intern in "A Year" who quietly listen to each other's worries in an indifferent and unjust workplace, the younger sister in "The Reply" who chooses to protect her older sister from domestic violence even if it means imprisonment, the aunt in "To My Aunt" who, having lost her fertility and enduring family scorn, still diligently raises her niece…
They are intimate yet distant, relying on each other yet independent, like small twinkling lights facing each other, recounting the thrill and emotion of finding kindred spirits in the dark. They come infinitely close and then abruptly head towards different distant places, eventually communicating with light across a great distance, even if they never meet again, even if the light is incredibly faint. As long as they know the other exists somewhere, they can keep going.

2025-08-01

国文出版社

Grinding Iron·Dayu Reading

248

9787512518919