WAYFARER: New Fiction by Korean Women

Eight long stories, all written since the late 1970s, representative of a new wave of Korean women only recently liberated from the second-class status imposed by a male-dominated society. The legacy of the Korean War and the consequent instability of national and family relations are rendered with vivid emotion in such challenging tales as Ch'oe Yun's ""The Last Hanak'o"" and Pak Wan-so's ""Identical Apartments,"" and in greater imaginative depth in the collection's two best pieces: the affecting title story (by Chong-hui) and Kong Son-ok's accomplished ""The Flowering of Our Lives."" Here is evidence of a rich vein of contemporary writing all but unknown to us--and well worth exploring.