The Cabinet [Paperback]

Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize.

Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species.

But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won’t stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat.

A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most everyday lives, from one of South Korea's most acclaimed novelists.

Translated by Sean Lin Halbert

File Under: Fiction [ 12,000 Cans of Beer | Memory Mosaicers | Will Execution Inc. | Monkey of All Bombs ]“The Cabinet is a sly, whimsical satire of life in late-stage capitalism, slippery and surreal... a kind of echoing chamber in which the comic, heartbreaking and terrifying bounce against, amplify and distort one another.
- Amar El-Mohtar , The New York Times

[A] brilliant mosaic novel...These stories straddle the lines between science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, and acute reality.
- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Deftly translated by award-winning Halbert, Kim’s latest import...again showcases his sly, surreal, dark humor about all the ways humans are, well, not particularly human.
– Booklist 

What begins as a rather whimsical set of stories turl³$