God-Disease

Winner of the 2023 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Manuel Muñoz.

Imagine a space where cities and municipalities are delineated only by letters. A place in flux, a freewheeling confluence that does not commit to being American, Korea, or even Korean American. This is where God-Disease takes place. Strange things happen here. Identities warp and shift; sometimes they vanish altogether. In the titular story, a museum insect curator returns to her birth town, J Municipality, feeling empty and searching for answers to her mother’s absence; was it insanity that plagued her, or was it shin-byeong--god-disease?

Equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream, the collection is a meditation on language, identity, and names, and how deceptively fragile they can be.

an chang joon was born in Seoul, Korea, but raised somewhere between Uzbekistan, Korea, and the eastern coast of the United States. His writing explores borders, not as a flat line, but as a liminal space of their own. He is never entirely sure on how to navigate between his two and a half names. His prose can be found in Barnstorm and Blue Earth Review, and was the runner-up for the Gulf Coast Review’s 2022 and 2023 Fiction Contest. He is the Korean translator for Nellie Hermann’s novel, The Season of Migration. He lives between Baton Rouge, LA, and Seoul, Korea.