Seoul

Pacific Rim meets Korean action dramas in this mind-blowing sci-fi novel set in New Seoul in the year 2199.

Everything you wanted to know about Seoul and were going to ask anyway. From ancient royal palaces, all-night markets, quaint alleyways and the Han River, to a space-age airport, the mammoth COEX mall and exhibition space and Lotte World, the planet's largest indoor theme park, no city combines the traditional and the contemporary quite like Seoul. Local experts weigh in on one of the world's leading cities. The head of the Seoul Literary Society lists his top reads, an economist explains "the miracle on the Han," the director of the National Museum highlights Korean cultural treasures, a prominent restaurant critic details Korean food essentials, a veteran diplomat discusses the changing face of Seoul, and a culture and history expert picks Seoul's most beautiful mountains. From the DMZ and the North-South divide to upscale shopping and the Korean Wave in film, television, style and music, to navigating local dining, linguistic and cultural practices and the city's neighborhoods, festivals, subway and climate, the Seoul Book of Everything captures the essence of an innovative and always evolving metropolis.Whether you live in Seoul or are visiting for the first time, there simply is no more comprehensive book about the city. If you want the insider's take on what makes the city tick, you'll love the Seoul Book of Everything!

Lonely Planet’s Pocket Seoul is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Wander the labyrinthine streets of Bukchon Hanok Village, explore the grand Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung palaces and try some local cuisine at Namdaemun Market – all with your trusted travel companion.

Lonely Planet: The world’s number one travel guide publisher* Lonely Planet’s Seoul is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Walk along the long-buried Cheonggyecheon stream, wander the labyrinthine streets of Bukchon Hanok Village and try some lip-smacking local cuisine at Gwangjang Market – all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Seoul and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet’s Seoul: Full colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sightseeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights provide a richer, more rewarding travel experience - covering history, people, music, religion, cuisine, politics Covers Myeong-dong, Gangnam, Apgujeong, Dongdaemun, Itaewon, Insa-dong, Yongsan-gu, Jung-gu, Hongdae, Sinchon, Edae, Yeouido, Namsan, Gwanghwamun, Jongno-gu, Jamsil, Daehangno, Seongbuk-dong The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet’s Seoul is our most comprehensive guide to Seoul, and is perfect for discovering both popular and offbeat experiences. Looking for more extensive coverage? Check out Lonely Planet’s Korea for an in-depth look at all the country has to offer. About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world’s number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we’ve printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You’ll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, video, 14 languages, nine international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more. ‘Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.’ – New York Times ‘Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.’ – Fairfax Media (Australia) *Source: Nielsen BookScan: Australia, UK, USA, 5/2016-4/2017 Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

K-pop (Korean popular music) reigns as one of the most popular music genres in the world today, a phenomenon that appeals to listeners of all ages and nationalities. In Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop, Crystal S. Anderson examines the most important and often overlooked aspect of K-pop: the music itself. She demonstrates how contemporary K-pop references and incorporates musical and performative elements of African American popular music culture as well as the ways that fans outside of Korea understand these references. K-pop emerged in the 1990s with immediate global aspirations, combining musical elements from Korean and foreign cultures, particularly rhythm and blues genres of black American popular music. Korean solo artists and groups borrow from and cite instrumentation and vocals of R&B genres, especially hip-hop. They also enhance the R&B tradition by utilizing Korean musical strategies. These musical citational practices are deemed authentic by global fans who function as part of K-pop’s music press and promotional apparatus. K-pop artists also cite elements of African American performance in Korean music videos. These disrupt stereotyped representations of Asian and African American performers. Through this process K-pop has arguably become a branch of a global R&B tradition. Anderson argues that Korean pop groups participate in that tradition through cultural work that enacts a global form of crossover and by maintaining forms of authenticity that cannot be faked, and furthermore propel the R&B tradition beyond the black-white binary.

Drawing on fieldwork in churches, concert halls, and schools of music, Harkness argues that the European-style classical voice has become a specifically Christian emblem of South Korean prosperity.

One woman learns that the price of belonging is often steeper than expected in this heart-wrenching yet hopeful romantic novel and first in the Seoul duology by USA Today bestselling author Jen Frederick. As a Korean adoptee, Hara Wilson doesn’t need anyone telling her she looks different from her white parents. She knows. Every time Hara looks in the mirror, she’s reminded that she doesn’t look like anyone else in her family—not her loving mother, Ellen; not her jerk of a father, Pat; and certainly not like Pat’s new wife and new “real” son. At the age of twenty-five, she thought she had come to terms with it all, but when her father suddenly dies, an offhand comment at his funeral triggers an identity crisis that has her running off to Seoul in search of her roots. What Hara finds there has all the makings of a classic K-drama: a tall, mysterious stranger who greets her at the airport, spontaneous adventures across the city, and a mess of familial ties, along with a red string of destiny that winds its way around her, heart and soul. Hara goes to Korea looking for answers, but what she gets instead is love—a forbidden love that will either welcome Hara home…or destroy her chance of finding one.

Seoul is a colossus both in its physical presence and the demand it places on any intellectual effort to understand it. How did it come to be? How can a city this immense work? Underlying its spectacle and incongruities is a city that might be described as ill at ease with its own past. The bitter rifts of Japanese colonization persist, as does the troubled aftermath of the Korean War and its divisions; the economic “Miracle on the Han” that followed is crosscut by memories of the violent dictatorship that drove it. In Seoul, author Ross King interrogates this contested history and its physical remnants, tacking between the city’s historiography and architecture, with attention to monuments, streets, and other urban spaces. The book’s structuring device is the dichotomy of erasure and memory as necessary preconditions for reinvention. King traces this phenomenon from the old dynasties to the Japanese regime and wartime destruction; he then follows the equally destructive reinvention of Korea under dictatorship to the brilliant city of the present with its extraordinary explosion of creativity and ideas—the post-1991 Hallyu, the Korean Wave. The final chapter returns to questions of forgetting and memory, but now as “conditions of possibility” for what would seem to underlie the present trajectory of this extraordinary city and culture. Seoul can be read, King suggests, in the context of the hybrid ideas that have characterized Korean cultural history. It may be their present eruption that accounts for the city of contradictions that confronts the contemporary observer and that most extraordinary of Korean phenomena: the rise of an alternative, virtual world, eclipsing both city and nation. Has the very idea of Korea been reinvented even as the weakly defined nation-state slips away?