Join us for an evening with renowned Korean writer Jung Young Moon, who will be reading from his new novel, Vaseline Buddha (Deep Vellum Publishing), translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung.

Vaseline Buddha is a tragicomic odyssey told through free association. The story opens when our sleepless narrator thwarts a would-be thief outside his moonlit window, then delves into his subconscious imagination to explore a variety of geographical and mental locations—real, unreal, surreal—to explore the very nature of reality: from a treacherous flight in the mountains of Nepal to a park bench in Budapest to a bizarre conversation in Amsterdam to an encounter with an inflatable rubber dolphin floating in a small river in provincial France.

One achieves a kind of serenity when we delve into this book. I find that eccentrics like Jung are needed in literature.
—Achim Stanislawski

Jung Young Moon was born in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea in 1965. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in psychology, and made his literary début in 1996 with the novel, A Man Who Barely Exists. Jung is also an accomplished translator who has translated more than forty books from English into Korean, including works by John Fowles, Raymond Carver, and Germaine Greer. In 2005 Jung was invited to participate in the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program, and in 2010 he spent three months in a residency at the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for Korean Study. In 2012 he won three of Korea’s most prestigious literary awards for his novel A Contrived World, just out from Dalkey Archive in spring 2016, who also published his short story collection A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories in 2014. His works have been translated into numerous languages, and he is widely read in France and Germany, where he enjoys tremendous critical acclaim and popular appeal.

Yewon Jung was born in Seoul, and moved to the US at the age of 12. She received a BA in English from Brigham Young University, and an MA from the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

This event is part of a nationwide tour arranged by publishers Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive (who recently released Jung’s novel A Contrived World) and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.