God-Disease

Winner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Manuel Muñoz.

Imagine a space where cities and municipalities are delineated only by letters. A place in flux, a freewheeling confluence that does not commit to being American, Korea, or even Korean American. This is where God-Disease takes place. Strange things happen here. Identities warp and shift; sometimes they vanish altogether. In the titular story, a museum insect curator returns to her birth town, J Municipality, feeling empty and searching for answers to her mother’s absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeong—god-disease?

Equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream, the collection is a meditation on language, identity, and names, and how deceptively fragile they can be.