The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories

A rarity among first, second, or even tenth collections, Kim maintains enviously superb quality throughout the dozen stories, in which she varies geographies (Korea, California, France), time periods (18th century to the future), and multiple generations.

Caroline Kim’s masterful short story collection captures myriad voices with nuance and insight.

During Kim’s search for books about Korea, she found few answers. Since then, there’s been a burst of English novels and memoirs set in Korea, both written in English originally and translated from the Korean. The connections Kim sought seem to now be coming though, and she’s added a selection of her own here.

Caroline Kim’s collection is a multifaceted chorus of voices from the Korean diaspora, spanning widely across genres and settings from the ancient world to a future yet to come.

An introspective, carefully crafted collection that uses the Korean diaspora as its central focus. . . . Caroline Kim is a gifted writer who surprises with her variety of settings and times.

Kim’s stories . . . ask what is most important in life, with the options ranging from fortune or pride to family, truth, connection, and expressions of love

Kim finds the real drama in the characters’ inner lives, where they struggle with what they feel but can’t or don’t want to articulate.

The Prince of Mournful Thoughts is a unique collection. The Korean themes and through-lines are clear, and each story works wonderfully together with the rest to achieve a general commentary on the Korean diaspora. Still, each one of these stories holds its own individual thoughts and ideas about the wider world, and each one works well on its own.

The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories is an extraordinary collection, and the title story alone is an astonishing feat, a fictional imagining of a haunting episode at court in medieval Korea, the problem of a prince who tries to murder his way out of his father’s unhappiness with him. The collection takes us in stories across the Korean diaspora, from ancient Korea to the Korean War to Korean Americans living in America in the recent past, the present, and even the future. [Caroline Kim] has a devastating sense of dramatic timing, a keen ear for dialogue, and experiments constantly, with structure, minimalism, science fiction, historical fiction, returning always with insight, intelligence, and an expansive sense of their characters’s humanity, which in turn points us to our own. These characters will live in my head a long time. And the prince is etched in my imagination forever.