The Hive and the Honey: Stories - Paul Yoon

Winner of The Story Prize Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize A Time Top 10 Best Fiction Book of 2023 and Must Read Book of 2023 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , Library Journal , Electric Literature , and the New York Public Library Expansive, haunting, and intimate, Paul Yoon's new short story collection The Hive and the Honey ...shows Yoon at the height of his powers. --Sabir Sultan, Pen America From the beloved award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a spectacular collection of unique stories, each confronting themes of identity, belonging, and the collision of cultures across countries and centuries. A boy searches for his father, a prison guard, on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family. The Hive and the Honey is a virtuosic ( Vanity Fair ) collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia? Absorbing...Yoon details fully realized and flawed characters attempting to wade through the complexities of immigrant life...[and] asks urgent questions about what it really means to belong somewhere. -- Time, 100 Must-Read Books of 2023