Review of Snowy Day and Other Stories by Lee Chang-dong

*Snow Day and Other Stories* by Lee Chang-dong (2025). Published by Penguin Press.

For the longest time, I’ve been saying that Lee Chang-dong is my favorite director. I’ve been studying Korean culture since college, but my beginnings with it trace all the way back to middle school. Turns out randomly taking Mandarin Chinese as my school language changed my life, as I had never been exposed to East Asian culture before.

It was in college I began getting more serious about film as a medium, although I was studying business and I became a film critic at an online outlet not long after graduating in 2021. It was in that job I really began developing my love and study of Asian cinema on a next level.

Korean cinema has been the heart of what I cover, as well as broader Asia, and Lee Chang-dong has been a director I massively respect. I remember in college, when I wqas broke and had no money, I went to a screening of Burning where Steven Yeun showed up. That was a game changer for me, and I realized how much more I loved the industry.

Regardless of how I got here, to reading this book, it’s because Lee Chang-dong is my favorite director. I have always admired his skill in incorporating novelistic and poetic storytelling into his work, as well as how he’s often depicted people on the fringes of Korean society. His work is so poignant and striking that it’s hard to ignore, and he was even placed on the government censorship list because of how he wasn’t afraid to write and direct movies and literature that was defiant.

I’d always wanted to read Lee’s creative work, but I didn’t purchase a copy the last time I was in Korea. Imagine my joy when Penguin reached out and asked if I wanted a copy of the book. They knew I was a major Lee fangirl, and I immediately said yes, as this was a dream years in the making.

So here’s my review! This is scheduled to go live the publication date, so happy reading. Much love to the publisher for the advance copy of the book—I truly did appreciate it.

A collection of short stories and a novella showing us life in 1980s South Korea.

For those of you who are not familiar with Lee’s work in general, he focuses a lot on the big picture issues through the lens of average people. He’s interested in the mundane stories and people impacted by broader policies, issues, and society.

And because this is set in 1980s Korea, we have to remember that there are a lot of hardships. Read the work of Han Kang to know of the massacres that happened in places like Gwangju in the name of democracy; Korean history during this time is brutal and full of dictatorships.

In several of the stories in this collection, if not all, Lee directly addresses this. The military presence looms over some of the characters in ways that are horrifying. In the novella, the female protagonist finds herself barred from her university after protesting, then is captured by the police and beat for information on those who are suspected to be rebelling.

Another story features two corporals set out together for a job on a snowy night; this is where the titular story comes from. Their story exposes the cracks and systemic issues plaguing Korea at the time, and when it ends up with a tragedy, we see how this becomes a mirror to the attitudes of the time.

Having never read Lee’s literary work, I was impressed by his voice and the prose on the page, but also surprised by it. He’s not afraid to get more crude in how he describes things, such as in the story “There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon.” In that story, the protagonist goes out to get goldfish and an aquarium in an attempt to save his failing marriage, but finds himself unable to get a taxi because of what’s holding and in dire need of a bathroom.

The rest of that story is history—we’re not going to delve deeper into spoiler territory. But all in all, I found that these stories are important right now, just as work like Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is translated and shows the trauma of the Jeju Massacres. A lot of people are focusing on contemporary Korea and how great it is, but there’s an insane amount of trauma among even Millennials.

In order to understand the present day, you need to be able to go into the past. And while this translation is gracing American shelves decades after it was published in South Korea, putting Lee in hot water and even on a government blacklist for his film work, there’s still relevance today.

Overall Thoughts

I found this to be such a worthy read. I already had a demonstrated interest in it, and had high expectations going into the book. I found them to be met, and I would have purchased a copy myself if this wasn’t sent to me. Lee is such a talented writer and filmmaker; I will happily go for anything he creates in the near future.

It also didn’t take me too long to read this either. I was in Houston on a mini trip when I brought along the copy, along with my copies of To the Lighthouse and Pavane for a Dead Princess, and I got through all three books in three days. This book specifically took me about two and a half hours to get through.

Pick this up if you’re interested in Lee’s work, Korean literature as a whole, or learning more about Korean history through the lens of fiction. If you fall into any of those categories, you’re going to find this an interesting and compelling read throughout.

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