Jin-in-Seoul
A multilingual archive of fiction
A Dictionary of Galactic Extinction
A Dictionary of Galactic Extinction began with two images.
One came from Men in Black: a tiny galaxy contained inside a bead hanging from a cat’s collar. The other came much later, from a simple question: what would happen if a candle burned inside a perfectly mirrored room and its light could never escape?
Those two images gradually became questions about light, energy, civilization, and extinction. What interested me was not a story in which evil destroys civilization, but a more difficult problem: what happens when rational and well-intentioned people keep solving problems, and the accumulated consequences of those solutions eventually become catastrophic?
The form of the novel grew from the same concern. Rather than tell the history of a vast civilization through a single protagonist and a single plot, I wanted the world to emerge through fragments of physics, history, people, words, records, and different kinds of documents.
At first, I wanted to write a story about placing a galaxy inside a small object. In the end, it became something entirely different. I wanted to place human goodwill, desire, fear, language, and reason inside a galaxy, and see where they would lead if allowed to operate to their logical end.
Serial Publication
A Dictionary of Galactic Extinction is currently being published online in serialized form in English, French, and Korean.
Sweater
Sweater follows a fourteen-year-old boy through one year of school, family, friendship, first love, books, embarrassment, curiosity, and the small discoveries that quietly change the shape of a life.
Told in the form of a diary, the novel moves quickly from one ordinary event to another, but its real subject is the way a young person begins to understand other people, himself, and the world around him.
The voice is curious, restless, comic, and reflective — sometimes running ahead like a young sprinter, sometimes slowing down long enough to notice what adults have stopped seeing.
Writer
Jin-in-Seoul studied philosophy at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He won the Grand Prize in the Essay category at the 2015 Esquire Montblanc Literary Award. His novel Sweater was published by Byeolsoop in 2018.