Table For One

An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrolls in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a shrinking motel during a never-ending snowstorm. In these and other indelible short stories, contemporary South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Her fiction is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic. Throughout Table for One, comedy and an element of the surreal are interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists’ decidedly mundane lives. Yun’s stories focus on solitary city dwellers, and her eccentric, often dreamlike humor highlights their sense of isolation. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, she calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialization and the displacement of traditional culture. Acquainting the English-speaking audience with one of South Korea’s breakout young writers, Table for One presents a parade of misfortunes that speak to all readers in their unconventional universality.

Table for one A critical reading of singlehood, gender and time is the first book to consider the profound relationship between singlehood and time. Drawing on a wide range of cultural resources - including web columns, blogs, advice columns, popular clichés, advertisements and references from television and cinema, the author challenges the conventional meaning-making processes of singlehood and time. Lahad's analysis gives us the opportunity to explore and theorize singlehood through varied temporal concepts such as waiting, wasting, timeout, age, the life course, linearity and commodification of time. This unique analytical approach enables the fresh consideration of some of our dominant perceptions about collective clocks, schedules, time tables and the temporal organization of social life in general.

Taara Maheshwari, a single woman in her thirties and a successful lawyer, is tough from outside but a die heart fan of romantic movies from inside.She grew up seeking her "happily ever after' but amid various heartbreaks and culture of modern age short term relationships, her believe in "true connections" got replaced by the comfort of being "emotionally disconnected."After she turned 31, her parents persuaded her into meeting a guy for marriage who sounded just perfect for her. Acting on impulse, she told her parents that she would meet him only if they let her go on a trip to Europe.As Taara went on to explore the world, she experienced what actually happens when a single Indian girl travels to Europe all by herself. Is it only about dancing, singing or falling in love? What happens after you fall in love? Does love conquer all? Only her story would tell.

I am a woman in my late-20s and have a voice that needs to be heard. The voice of all women out there who feel they aren't good enough and struggle by being seen purely for their status, "single", in that they are viewed as an imperfection rather than something to be valued. With all my heart, soul and everything I have and beyond, I decided to write down all my experiences of my dating life for the past 6 years as a way for me to vent and find some sort of closure from all the pain and disappointment. Although I obtained a far greater gift from this process than I could have ever imagined. Through all of this, I created this book, which is my greatest accomplishment. I want to be able to impact at least one person, that is all it would take, to give them this same gift that I have given to myself. To be able to wake up everyday knowing that they aren't a failure because they are still single, and to not be ashamed of their past as those items are what have shaped them to become the person they are today. …I am just a woman from Long Island and I know I could help change the world with my voice. So this book is my mic and it’s my time to speak to the world, so listen…

It's one hell of a night in an underground restaurant in Manhattan. William Howland's boss bet against him lasting a year as a waiter in this place. It's pay-up time. But on this night, Will's code to treat all as they deserve doesn't serve anyone well, and he might not even last the night.

The dictionary defines a widow as "a woman who has outlived the man to whom she was married to at the time of his death." Deborah Spungen was someone's wife, Frank Spungen's wife. They had been married for almost 54 years. She could hardly remember a life when she wasn't Frank's wife. In the early morning hours of July 2, 2010 Frank Spungen passed away, just seven weeks after becoming ill. Deb soon realized she had no preparatory course in becoming a widow, there was no handbook to read. Her status as a person was irrevocably changed in ways that she couldn't even begin to fathom. She wondered, "Who will I be if I am not the same me that I was when I woke up this morning?'' How does one create a new life alone? Follow Spungen's story as she examines the process of reconstructing her life. In Frank's last weeks he told Deb to go home again, and so she did. She built a new life with a new home and new friends. Discover how writing her story became the key to the process. Follow as she traverses widowhood one essay at a time. Learn how she focused on what was, what is, and what could be as she discovers that she has the power to find peace and well-being again.

A Table for One is set in the intimate Jerusalem cafes of the 1950's and 1960's where the scent of fresh roasted coffee and cigarette smoke wafted in with the elan of a lost European culture. The writer's son, Meir Appelfeld, paints cityscapes, vistas of the city, where he himself lives.