Changbi Publishers : English
  • Changbi (Korean)
  • the Quarterly Changbi
  • RSS
  •  
  • Japanese
  •  
  • Home
Search for:
Fiction
All
Age 6-8
2네모돼지-입체

Square Pigs

Written byKim, Tae-ho
120 pages
October.25.2015
ISBN: 9788936442828
₩ 9,000

 

An unfamiliar world presented through bold imagination

 

Kim Tae-ho is a budding children’s story writer who has produced noteworthy works since he received the Changbi Prize for New Figures in Children’s Literature. He now presents Square Pigs, which gathers unique and highly polished tales including his maiden work “Wait!” which was evaluated with the praise that “it [was] a great fortune to witness short story aesthetics on this level.” In seven stories for youngsters, the author develops the narrative by portraying problematic situations through bold imagination. The title work, “Square Pigs” is a tale about pigs that are raised in a square metal box and a round pig who reads to them a book about how to go to heaven. “How to Recycle Cats” is a story about a cat trapped in a recycling bin for old clothes. A parody of the traditional Korean tale “The Brother and Sister Who Became the Sun and the Moon,” “One Day, a Tiger Came to My House” is a story about a woman who wagers her life in a contest with a tiger that one day appears and opens the door to her apartment. By realistically showing how animals respond in unfamiliar spaces and in unfamiliar incidents and why seemingly preposterous circumstances occur, Kim leads readers to see events and situations in children’s tales as things that can happen around us as well. Serious and keen is the question pervading the entire volume: “What would you have done?”

 

An unfamiliar and strange world from animals’ perspectives

 

The stories collected in Square Pigs develop through the voices of animals. These animals realistically portray humans and their world from their standpoints. The protagonist of the first work in the collection, “Wait!” is a dog left alone in a village from which all humans have left due to a sudden accident. In a situation where it can obtain neither food nor water, it waits for its master, who cherished it as a family member. Even though all other beasts leave the village in scorn, the canine awaits until the end, believing in the return of its master, who left with the word “Wait!” The tiger that stars in “One Day, a Tiger Came to My House” enters a private human home and pretends to be the matriarch of the family. Although the beast resembles the mother only in appearance, with a completely different voice and strange clothing, members of this family merely see this as slightly odd and none of them realizes the true identity of the imposter. While the tales gathered in Square Pigs are fabular as they frequently star anthropomorphized animals, Kim does not focus on satirizing humans and conveying didactic messages. Rather, in the process of exposing through the voices of animals problems that people have overlooked or pretended not to see, he painstakingly provides youngsters with opportunities to think. In the course of reading Square Pig, which calmly and sensitively depicts the ways in which humans live, readers will come to see our world a bit differently.

‹
  • About Changbi
    • history
    • location
    • news
    • Quarterly Changbi
    • Changbi Review of Children’s Literature
  • about the Quarterly Changbi
  • Changbi Books_Adults
    • Fiction
    • Non-Fiction
    • Collection-short stories
    • Essay
    • Literary criticism
    • Poetry
    • Humanities
    • History
    • Social science
    • Art & Culture
    • Science & Nature
    • Graphic novel
    • Biography & Memory
    • Parenting
  • Changbi Books_YA
    • Fiction
    • Non-fiction
  • Changbi Books_Children
    • Picture book
    • Fiction_Age 6-8
    • Fiction_Age 8-10
    • Fiction_Age 10-13
    • Fiction_Others (folklore….)
    • Poetry
    • Non-fiction
  • Changbi Prizes
    • the Manhae Prize for Literature
    • The Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature
    • The Baeksok Prize for Literature
    • Changbi Prize in Novel
    • Changbi Prize for New Figures in Literature
    • Changbi Prize for Young Adult Book
    • Changbi Prize for New Figures in Children’s Literature
    • Changbi “Good Books for Children” Competition
  • Changbi Authors
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • R
    • P
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • W
    • V
    • X
    • Y
    • Z
  • Recent Post
  • Tags

  • Almond wins the 2020 17th annual Japan Booksellers’ Award in the category for translated fiction.
  • Stairway to Space wins 60th Korea Book Awards for children’s books
  • [The Moon over the Apple Orchard, Reception of a special mention in fiction in the 2019 BolognaRagazzi Award!]
  • [ My Exploration of Cultural Heritage on China] published
  • [The Mother of All Questions] published
  • [My Exploration of Cultural Heritage] series, the highlights of an unequaled bestselling project
  • [Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age] published

Tags

Society fiction Adult Humanities book Literature YA Graphic novel Picturebook Picture book Adults Education nonfiction history Children’s books Picture books Non-fiction Children General books Korean Peninsula
  • facebook
  • twitter
Changbi Publishers : English
Copyright 1998-2000 Changbi Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. /
mail to: webmaster@changbi.com
Changbi Publishers, Inc. 184 Hoedong-gil, Paju-si, Gyeonggi-do 10881, Korea
Tel 82-31-955-3333 Fax 82-31-955-3400