Hwang Bo-reum Releases New Novel 'The Couple Upstairs' After Four-Year Hiatus

Author Hwang Bo-reum, who received love from readers worldwide for 'Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookstore' 15 years after her debut, has released her new full-length novel 'The Couple Upstairs' after a four-year break. The work depicts the changing perspective of Oh Kyung-jik, a 70-year-old retiree, as he confronts the issue of low birth rates in our society and the arduous lives of the younger generation through the young couple living above him. In this work, Hwang Bo-reum connects the low birth rate issue not to individual choices but to vast societal problems such as the oppressive labor environment, housing insecurity, and generational disconnects that pressure young people, focusing on the power of relationships to help people live again.

Richard Zenith's 'A Biography of Fernando Pessoa' has been published. This book covers the life and literary world of Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa published only one collection of poems, 'Mensagem,' during his lifetime, but after his death, his vast manuscripts were discovered, leading to his re-evaluation as a master of 20th-century world literature. His manuscripts were designated a national treasure of Portugal in 2019.

This book was written by Richard Zenith, an authority on Pessoa studies and English translation, and translated into Korean by Kim Han-min and Kim Sol-ha. The translated edition, exceeding 1400 pages, meticulously reconstructs Pessoa's poems, prose, philosophical thoughts, as well as the relationships between his various heteronyms and the process of his works' creation. The biography closely traces how Pessoa's inner world and literary universe could expand into countless personas and voices, despite his relatively quiet life centered in Lisbon.

The core of Pessoa's literature lies in his approximately 70 'heteronyms.' These are more than mere pseudonyms; they represent independent authorial personalities with distinct lives, characters, writing styles, and philosophies. Representative heteronyms include Alberto Caeiro, who emphasized sensory experience; Ricardo Reis, who pursued classical restraint; and Álvaro de Campos, who expressed modern anxiety and impulse. Through them, Pessoa continued his literary experiment of constantly becoming other beings without remaining confined to a single self. The book explores how fundamental questions such as existence and non-existence, sensation and reality, and the human essence maintained amidst change, shaped his literature.