New literary books for Sept. 4

The new poetry collection “Scary Stories” by Kim Haeng-sook imagines a planet that has become impossible to inhabit. That vision, the poet writes, makes her love feel desperate. The book brings together 50 poems built around fear and the limits of imagination.

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The more I imagine a planet that has become impossible to inhabit, the more desperate my love became.

In one poem, the speaker imagines that “life truly begins only after abandoning my mother.” Without the ability to imagine horror, another poem suggests, life would remain unchanged, repeating itself exactly as it is now.

Lee Jang-wook’s short-story collection “Somehow, Though Not Horror” contains 16 stories, including “The Vegetarian Scandal,” about a person who turns to eating meat after losing love and reaches emptiness and fear. Written across several decades, the stories vary widely in form and tone, while maintaining the author’s sensitivity to an unsettling real world.

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Life truly begins only after abandoning my mother.

Kim Ae-ran publishes her first essay collection in seven years with “I Wrote That It Happened.” She writes that literature gave her tools for managing a life that can grow accustomed to emptiness and boredom after adulthood. The book moves between literary and everyday subjects without relying on an idealized vision of literature.

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If becoming an adult means becoming accustomed to emptiness or boredom, I found through literature what might be called techniques or tools for managing it.

The new Korean translation of Stefan Zweig’s memoir “The World of Yesterday” recounts the destruction of the author’s spiritual home, Europe. A believer in reason and progress, Zweig describes the “most brutal victory of barbarism” brought by two world wars. The list also includes Maurice Blanchot’s expansive criticism collection “Infinite Conversation,” which examines literary language, otherness, nihilism, death, speech, and silence through writers including Kafka, Camus, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Pascal, and Beckett.

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The most brutal victory of barbarism.