God-Disease [Paperback]

Winner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Manuel Mu?oz.

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 whereGod-Diseasetakes 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 mothers absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeonggod-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.USan chang joonwas born in Seoul, Korea, but raised somewhere between Uzbekistan, Korea, and the eastern coast of the United States. His writing explores borders, not as a flat line, but as a liminal space of their own. He is never entirely sure on how to navigate between his two and a half names. His prose can be found inBarnstormandBlue Earth Review, and was the runner-up for theGulf Coast Reviews 2022 and 2023 Fiction Contest. He is the Korean translator for Nellie Hermanns novel,The Season of Migration. He lives between Baton Rouge, LA, and Seoul, Korea.

Introduction byManuel Muñoz

“Sometimes I see places and people that I’ve never known—” says a character near the end of this astonishing collection, “and I think that I’d be able to love them . . . At least love better than what I know now.” Such a statement, made with the characteristic straightforwardness that marks the style holding these stories together, is one that yields even deeper rewards on second glance. God-Disease