Paul Yoon

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author PAUL YOON—Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University and author of Once the Shore and Snow Hunters—for a reading from his latest book, The Mountain: Stories.

About The Mountain

From Paul Yoon, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Once the Shore and Snow Hunters, comes a luminous collection of short stories set throughout the world—from the Hudson Valley to the Russian Far East—across periods of time after World War II.

In The Mountain, Paul Yoon displays his subtle, ethereal, and strikingly observant style with six thematically linked stories, taking place across several continents and time periods and populated with characters who are connected by their traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace in their futures. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds (from a sanatorium in the Hudson Valley to an inn in the Russian far east) they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal. A morphine-addicted nurse wanders through the decimated French countryside in search of purpose; a dissatisfied wife sporadically takes a train across Spain with a much younger man in the wake of a building explosion; a lost young woman emigrates from Korea to Shanghai, where she aimlessly works in a camera sweat shop, trying fruitlessly to outrun the ghosts of her past.

Hailed by New York magazine as a “quotidian-surreal craft-master” and a “radiant star in the current literary firmament” by The Dallas Morning News, Yoon realizes his worlds with quiet, insightful, and gorgeous prose. Though each story is distinct from the others, his restrained voice and perceptive observations about violence—to the body, the landscape, and ultimately, the human soul—weaves throughout this collection as a whole, making The Mountain a beautiful, memorable read.

Praise

"The Mountain is atmospherically so compelling, and describes so movingly the loneliness and courage of these characters.  Paul Yoon mines the interstices of our experience—it’s full of pregnant spaces—we are haunted by all that isn’t said.  This is the voice with which we speak to ourselves when no one is listening.  The book is profound, in the way that W.G. Sebald’s work is—like him, Yoon’s voice is quiet and sincere and urgent—and that’s what makes the collection so powerful, and what ties the collection together.  The characters are disconnected, yet we feel deeply connected to them.  It’s mysterious and elusive and distinctive, a brilliant collection of stories, and a unified work of art." —Daniyal Mueenuddin, author of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award 

"Paul Yoon writes as if in a state of grace. In The Mountain, he moves across continents and time periods with breathtaking assurance, setting minutely observed individual lives against the tidal pull of history. He tells the story of border crossings, both literal and metaphorical. We are all migrants in one way or another; The Mountain narrates our shared story of movement." —Katie Kitamura, critically-acclaimed author of A Separation and The Longshot