Release of debut novel: Spring on the Peninsula

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that my debut novel is now available for pre-order at: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736369/spring-on-the-peninsula-by-ery-shin/. This is an indie press, Astra House, and the distributor is Penguin. The official publication date is April 9, 2024.

Would so appreciate your support, and while the official jacket cover and other details are pasted below, the gist of the story is, I'd say...millennial angst in Seoul, heartbreak, nightlife, and all the stray thoughts we have when we can't go to sleep and work feels endless and everyone seems far away?

Anyhow, I do hope you enjoy it, and Happy 2024 :)

Best,
Ery Shin '08


ABOUT SPRING ON THE PENINSULA

A desultory libertine mourns a failed relationship over the course of two harsh winters in this unprecedented portrait of millennials living in Seoul.

The time is roughly now and Kai, a white-collar worker, has just been abandoned by his longtime lover. Follow him through a labyrinth of alleyways as he reels from this sudden departure. Accompany him up snowy mountains where he contemplates ending his own life. That mourning can be both an art and ever-unfolding journey is epitomized in the paths that Kai crosses and the lives he alters for better or worse.

Kai is not the only one feeling disoriented and aimless these days. Those in his inner circle similarly experience personal crises as they go through their thirties in a nation simmering with class and generational tensions as well as the specter of new and old wars. Evocative of Dangerous Liaisons in its social appraisals, and in the tradition of Neruda’s erotic reveries, Ery Shin’s striking debut captures contemporary Seoul in all of its glory and turmoil. Phantasmagorical and melancholic, and daringly irreverent, Spring on the Peninsula is a poignant meditation on modern life in a city beset by North Korea’s shadow.


ABOUT ERY SHIN

Ery Shin was born in Ames, Iowa in 1986. She was 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 in the same discipline 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.

Ticket Website: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736369/spring-on-the-peninsula-by-ery-shin/