Paul Yoon

press release: Paul Yoon displays his subtle, ethereal, and strikingly observant style with six thematically linked stories in The Mountain. It’s a luminous collection set across several continents—from the Hudson Valley to the Russian Far East—and periods of time after World War II, populated with characters who are connected by traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace. Though singular, they are united by the struggle to reconcile their pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal. A morphine-addicted nurse wanders through the decimated French countryside in search of purpose; a dissatisfied wife sporadically takes a train across Spain with a much younger man in the wake of a building explosion; a from Korea to Shanghai, where she aimlessly works in a camera sweat shop, trying to outrun the ghosts of her past.