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‘I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist

By Kim Ju-sŏng · The Guardian · December 2023

‘I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist

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"The long read: Before I fled south, I spent years as an aspiring fiction writer in the hermit kingdom. I worked hard - but literary glory kept eluding me"

Read full essay at The Guardian ↗

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Book spotlight

This is water

This is water

David Foster Wallace

17 ratings on Open Library

Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

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