Love in the Big City

Four stories, one narrator, and a lot of Seoul nights. Park Sang-young's Love in the Big City arrived from Changbi Publishers on July 1, 2019, and it does not behave like a conventional novel. Ko Yeong, a young gay man, carries the book across four linked sections that jump between dating apps, bar stools, a hospital ward, and the apartment he shares with his straight best friend Mi Ae. Park wrote the pieces separately, and one of them, "A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe," had already won the Young Writers' Prize before the book existed.

The wry voice is the engine. Ko Yeong cracks jokes about his own bad decisions and then, a page later, sits with something much heavier without announcing the shift. Park has said he wanted the book to hold every kind of love he could fit inside it, and the range shows: romantic love, friendship love, the love of a mother who does not fully understand her son, the love of a city that keeps offering new rooms to rent. NPR's review put its finger on the tension at the center, the way pride and shame tangle together for queer people in Seoul.

Anton Hur translated it into English in 2021 for Grove Atlantic in the US and Tilted Axis Press in the UK. Roughly 15 languages followed. The longlists came too: the International Booker Prize in 2022, the International Dublin Literary Award in 2023, and France's Prix Médicis for foreign literature in 2024. The Korean edition runs 288 pages.

Then the screen versions multiplied the audience. A 2024 feature film with Kim Go-eun and Noh Sang-hyun premiered at Toronto and hit theaters that October, while a separate TVING series starring Nam Yoon-su told the story at series length. Neither is a sequel. The novel stands alone, and the adaptations did the extending. [edit]