In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or ….

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes..

Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I've learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash….

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw..

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. W….

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is tru….

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar..

Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And….

I'd known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn't be possible, since it's illegal for them to sp….

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth..

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . ..

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out..

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you do….

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy..

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past..

I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare ligh….

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely ….

"A name isn't a person." Ga said. "Don't ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on y….

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your tr….

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough,….