A Love Story from the End of the World - by Juhea Kim (Paperback)

About the Book

"From the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world. Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances. With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim's first story collection views our broken world-and broken hearts-from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human-but without nature, we are nothing at all"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world

Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made apocalypse: in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances.

With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim's first story collection views our broken world--and broken hearts--from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human--but without nature, we are nothing at all.

Review Quotes

"[A] delicate story collection...excellent...Kim excels at revealing the far-reaching and destabilizing effects of traumatic events on her characters. Readers will savor these nuanced tales." -- Publisher's Weekly

"Characters...come to realize that love might be the only thing powerful enough to tether them...Well-drawn and compelling stories that span continents, encouraging the essential acts of saying or doing something to protect what we hold dear." -- Library Journal

"Lush and evocative, Juhea Kim's A Love Story from the End of the World is like a precision cut diamond that fractures light into a spectrum of possible futures on this, our wounded planet . . . Despite flights of imagination, Kim's stories ultimately tether us to the earth and demand that we give it our attention. This is an exquisite and essential collection." --Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed to the Manticore -- Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed to the Manticore

"In A Love Story from the End of the World, Juhea Kim offers both an unsettling glimpse at what climate change might mean for our planet, and a vision of the transcendent moments of beauty and human connection that make it possible to survive in a changing world." -- Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring