 The Queens of K-Town
(MacAdam Cage, 2007)
by Angela Mi-Young Hur
Released August 2007
300 pages/$23.00
Twenty-six-year-old Cora Moon comes back to Manhattan s Koreatown after an absence of ten years. The vision of a girl standing on the edge of a building hurtles Cora back into memory to her first summer in K-town, where along with her new friends, she got lost in the maze of nightclubs and room salons, mini-marts and private dining rooms behind rice-paper doors. The novel alternates between two worlds, as she relives her past and drifts through her present, in which she begins an affair with a stranger she calls The Monk. They play psychiatrist in his living room, but Cora seeks understanding of herself through a crash course in theoretical physics. What seems to be a coming-of-age-story veers off into the higher dimensions and the shady underworld, featuring shamans and shopkeepers, misfits and exiles. From the prologue, we know that ten years ago, a girl leapt to her death. We know nothing else except that she was Cora s first love. The rooftop girl in the present is a stranger, which makes it convenient for Cora to assume her identity and follow in her footsteps. A double-stranded narrative, the novel gradually unravels two mysteries: Who was the first girl who jumped? And what will happen when Cora finally reaches the top?
About the Author
Angela Hur was born in Los Angeles in 1980, and raised in Gardena, California. Since the age of fourteen, she has stopped off at various points across the country, including Andover, Harvard, and Notre Dame, where she received her MFA in 2005. While there she was a Sparks Fellow and the Managing Editor of the Notre Dame Review. Upon graduation, she was awarded the Sparks Prize, which allowed her to write full-time for a year. She s also lived in San Francisco and Brooklyn and is currently in Long Beach, California.
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