The Hive and the Honey: Stories

by Paul Yoon

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668020807
Publisher:	S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	245,771
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. .

Editorial Reviews

"A slim but exquisite collection... that is breathtaking in scope, detailing the persistence of imperialism, war, poverty and dislocation across generations...a masterpiece in restraint...Yoon expertly telescopes between the long view and the close-up." —May-lee Chai, New York Times, Shortlist

"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 Magazine, 100 Must-Read Books of 2023

"In a quietly powerful short-story collection, Paul Yoon creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Korean diaspora. In these stories, one of which appeared in the magazine, Yoon’s characters struggle to find a place for themselves in a world where life can be capricious and harsh, but sometimes marked by grace." —The New Yorker, The Best Books We Read This Week

"In seven virtuosic stories centering characters that include a 17th-century samurai and a contemporary New York immigrant, Yoon captures scenes of the Korean diaspora." —Vanity Fair, 13 New Books to Read This Month

"Paul Yoon masterfully explores the shared history, displacement, alienation, and the lasting effects of war....Yoon’s lean and cutting prose dissects truth and inheritance, interweaves haunting tales with mundane lives, and reveals far-flung characters searching for home." —Electric Literature, "Electric Lit's Best Short Story Collections of 2023"

“Yoon’s new short-story collection is another spare, controlled masterpiece, comprising seven exquisite stories highlighting the Korean diaspora scattered across time and oceans.” —Terry Hong, Booklist (starred)

"Expansive, haunting and intimate, Paul Yoon’s new short story collection The Hive and the Honey (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023) shows Yoon at the height of his powers. Following characters of the Korean diaspora throughout history and across geographies, the collection’s stories ask essential questions about how we build families and homes." —Sabir Sultan, Pen America


"The Hive and the Honey comprises seven masterful short stories that span 500 years of Korean diaspora...Yoon’s grandfather escaped North Korea, and the author’s works deal fittingly with belonging, home, immigration, and identity." —TIME Magazine, The 15 New Books You Should Read in October

"Yoon’s haunting, evocative new collection centers on themes of migration, displacement, collective memory and the Korean diaspora." —New York Times, 34 Works of Fiction to Read This Fall

"A complex look at alienation, identity, and the lasting effects of war.... Yoon’s attention to historic detail makes these tales of displaced people all the more affecting."
—TIME Magazine, 36 Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2023

“Yoon carefully mingles the extraordinary with the everyday, evoking the natural world with simple yet striking language...This is an elegant exploration of life’s brutal and beautiful moments.”
—Publisher's Weekly

"The third short story collection (his first since 2017’s The Mountain) from Young Lions Fiction Award-winner and Guggenheim fellow Yoon spans cultures and centuries, roving from small town New York, where a formerly incarcerated man tries to start a new life, to the Edo Period in Japan, where a Samurai escorts an orphan boy back to his countrymen. Yoon’s 2020 novel-in-stories Run Me to Earth—a subtly devastating panoramic portrait of three lives displaced by war—was one of the standout books of that year, so I’m pretty damn excited for this one."
—Lit Hub (Most Anticipated Books of 2023)

“Stories that echo with the loss, regret, and hope of migrants and nomads.”
—Kirkus

"Yoon weaves complex tales of belonging and identity, of cultures clashing and building upon each other to create the multitudes that exist within communities."

—Patricia Thang, BookRiot

The Hive and the Honey is much more than an exquisite, beautiful collection of short stories. Yoon roves geographic and historical points, catching stories of the Korean diaspora and, in the best way, the way of great literature, locates narratives that would disappear forever if he didn't find them, characters far from home, longing for home, finding ways to reconcile and embrace complex new landscapes. This is a book about all of us. If you let each of these wonderful stories into your soul, you'll feel the way I felt when I read this collection. I was in the hands of a vivid, powerfully honed imagination and came out better, more human, having learned something new about the world.
—David Means, author of Two Nurses, Smoking

"The stories in The Hive and the Honey are geographically and temporally diverse. Each opens an inviting door to a seemingly calm moment in life, only to cast the readers into the deep and murkey undercurrent of history. Amid violence are moments of gentleness; underneath darkness and bleakness are glimpses of light and humor. Yoon is a beautiful and beguiling writer, and should be called a national—or, international—treasure!
—Yiyun Li, Author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

From the Publisher

08/07/2023

Yoon (Run Me to the Earth) delivers a lean collection of stories featuring restless, complex characters driven by their need for connection and forgiveness. Throughout, themes of displacement and loss are juxtaposed with simple moments of love and understanding. In “Bosun,” an ex-con wrestles with how to relate to others, considering all that he’s already lost. “Komarov” finds Lee Jooyun, who fled North Korea and eventually wound up in Barcelona, agreeing to wear a wire to gain information on a Russian boxer for her birth country, in exchange for learning about the family she left behind. In the title story, 22-year-old Andrei Bulavin composes a letter to his uncle back in Russia, recounting a disturbing supernatural event at the Korean settlement he’s been sent to police. Yoon carefully mingles the extraordinary with the everyday, evoking the natural world with simple yet striking language: “We come upon a tree that has flowered early. It stands alone amid the endless row of cedars that line the road, its bright red color so sudden and distracting—like the appearance of a door among the evergreens.” This is an elegant exploration of life’s brutal and beautiful moments. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/22/2023

NYPL Young Lion Yoon (Snow Hunters) ranges far as he investigates shifting identities and cultures in this new collection. A boy searches for his prison-guard father on chilly Sakhalin Island. A New York City denizen freshly out of prison tries to rebuild his life and start a family in upstate New York, with unsteady results. In a story that reads almost like a thriller, a woman travels to Barcelona to seek out a prize fighter who could be her long-lost son. Civil servants in Edo-era Japan guard a Korean orphan, tasked with turning him over to his countrymen even as they grow close. A married couple whose fathers both came from North Korea find that they still face pervasive prejudice about their backgrounds. The crisp, low-key writing is just right, the better to see the stories' ribs; there's clear craft here, as well as a generous imagination. VERDICT Yoon takes readers around the world for a satisfying, insightful read.—Barbara Hoffert

Library Journal

2023-07-13
Widows, orphans, and refugees from Korea make their ways across alien landscapes in seven new stories.

Yoon’s work, whether in novels or short fiction, tends to create miniature mysteries, but his latest is all unanswered questions and old regrets. In the opener, “Bosun,” a life of crime leads to one of life’s crossroads for an ex-con working at a Canadian casino. Cold war politics provide the backdrop but not the drama in “Komarov,” which finds a North Korean maid who's lived in Europe for years traveling to Russia circa 1980 to reunite with the son she left behind, now a professional fighter. Yoon’s interest in history also extends further back in two stories. The first, “At the Post Station,” is set in 1608 and follows a feudal samurai on a diplomatic mission, while "The Hive and the Honey" is an epistolary ghost story in the form of a letter from a solider to his uncle written on the steppes of Eastern Russia in 1881. Most of the stories are little more than fleeting moments in the lives of the Korean diaspora, such as “Cromer,” in which the children of North Korean defectors find their domestic happiness in London interrupted by a strange boy. There’s a pervasive atmosphere of loneliness and forced solitude as reunions go awry and destinies lay unfulfilled, but there's also the steely stubbornness of people who have no choice but to keep going. These feelings are palpable in the final two stories, starting with “Person of Korea,” in which a 16-year-old boy is orphaned by the death of his uncle and sets off for a remote island where he hopes to be reunited with his father, a guard who works at the prison where the boy’s grandfather was once confined. Finally, “Valley of the Moon” chronicles the life of a man whose trespasses against others eventually translate into violence against his children.

Stories that echo with the loss, regret, and hope of migrants and nomads.

Kirkus Reviews