I Said Goodbye
Korean Title: 안녕이라 그랬어
Author: Ae-ran Kim
Publisher: Munhak Dongne
ISBN: 9791141602376
320 pages | 133 * 200 mm | 416 g
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
Ae-ran Kim Returns with Her New Short Story Collection I Said Goodbye, Eight Years After Outside, It’s Summer
Eight years after the publication of her acclaimed collection Outside, It’s Summer, Ae-ran Kim returns with I Said Goodbye, a new volume of short stories. This collection includes seven stories, among them “Home Party”, which received the Excellence Award at the 2022 Kim Seung-ok Literary Prize and was praised as “a sharply crafted story that captures emotional particles drifting through social spaces and gives them clear, resonant form,” and “Good Neighbors”, which won the 2022 Oh Young-su Literary Prize.
In I Said Goodbye, Kim’s signature ability to construct a richly layered world—through emotional intensity and ethical dilemmas—remains fully intact. Yet readers will detect a noticeable shift: a cooler, more unsentimental tone that marks a subtle evolution in her voice.
In this collection, the central figure might well be space itself. As one line in “Home Party” observes, “Many plays begin with an invitation or a visit, an intrusion or an escape” (p. 42). In much the same way, each story here begins when a character enters someone else’s space. That space might be a graceful, stable home that reflects the host’s aesthetic and ease (“Home Party”); a modest house overseas where the low cost of living enables a rare, month-long escape—“a luxury I’ve never had before” (“The Little House in the Forest”); a rental apartment carefully tended to but now being vacated for the next tenant (“Good Neighbors”); or a small bookstore opened with all the money saved after quitting a job (“Lemon Cake”).
What makes space so important in I Said Goodbye is that it functions not merely as a setting but as an extension of life itself. For Ae-ran Kim—who has long written with keen insight about what it means to have “a room of one’s own” in contemporary Korean society—certain spaces represent economic and social realities, as well as repositories of personal history. The conflicts that arise around these spaces often reflect deeper clashes of values and life experiences. To step into another person’s space, the stories suggest, is also to step beyond the boundaries of the life you’ve lived until now.
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