Ery Shin’s novel Spring on the Peninsula is an inventive and provocative debut.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“An] unforgettable debut . . . The skill with which the novel is crafted—blurring the distinctions between daydream, fantasy, and reality with lilting, metaphorical prose—is undeniable . . . Shin masterfully locates the individual struggle to find meaning within a broader discourse, tussling with notions of class, gender, sexuality, generational divides, and war.”
In her own words, here is Ery Shin’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Spring on the Peninsula:
Because Spring on the Peninsula follows Seoul’s millennials and Generation X, much of its envisioned soundtrack has to do with K-pop before it became a globally recognized term—its early days, in short, as well as those before boy bands and girl groups rose to prominence in South Korea. Popular music in Korea has never just been about, of course, synthesized dance music. By the same token, music that Koreans danced to was alive and well before the 90s.
A number of the songs below, lastly, harken back to the years that emotionally molded the generations who rode out all the regime changes, the dictatorships before South Korea settled into a true, stable republic. They’re nostalgic picks—and classics through and through.
(Korean has been used whenever English translations aren’t available or standardized.)
신중현 (Shin Joong Hyun) – “미련”
r.ef – “심연”
Two songs that capture some of Spring’s protagonist Kai’s unsettled feelings toward his ex.
The Roots – “Break You Off”
Akinvele – “Put It in Your Mouth”
Tracks that used to be played at nb, a popular hip-hop nightclub in Seoul’s Hongdae district during the aughts; an establishment the character Yoon would’ve frequented with his foreign high school friends.
Boris Brejcha – “Bumblebee”
Yaeji – “Drink I’m Sippin On”
Jnr Choi and Sam Tompkins – “To the Moon”
Tracks that Kai, apart from Yoon, would party or groove to.
Seo Taeji and Boys – “Come Back Home”
A landmark rap track and rallying cry for South Korea’s embittered youth of the 90s.
김민기 (Kim Min-ki) – “아침 이슬” (Morning Dew)
An early 70s folk song censored a few years after its release for being associated with the anti-authoritarian student demonstrations of the time. What Kai’s parents, as college students, would’ve listened to and later on played in the house while their sons were growing up.
윤연선 (Yoon Yun Sun) – “얼굴” (Face)
The song Kai alludes to in Chapter 11, whose lyrics involve someone drawing their beloved’s face unwittingly.
Alex Rose ft. Cazzu, Lenny Tavarez, Lyanno, and Rauw Alejandro – “Toda (remix)”
One of my favorite driving tracks in the period I was finishing up this manuscript.
Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1986, and raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University and a doctorate from the University of Oxford. The author of Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years, a study of Stein’s later experimental gestures and their philosophical implications within Hitler’s Europe, she is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Spring on the Peninsula is her first novel.