Introduction

    Adoration of the Korean is a short story collection consisting of nine stories and novellas, each of which is set in South Korea in the 1990s and investigates the intricacies—humorous, dark, and beautiful—of cross-cultural relationships between American and other expatriate English teachers and their adult South Korean students. Moonstruck students relentlessly pursue their teachers as often as these teachers, repentant and shameless alike, pursue their students.

    Love is sometimes strong enough to surmount formidable barriers to mutual understanding and lasting happiness as the characters in the stories are forced to come to terms with culture clash, the problematic nature of intercultural communication, and the complicated personal issues which impelled not a few of the expatriates to abandon their native lands in the first place. All of the stories feature realistic depictions of a shared reverence for love's purity found by people from different ends of the Earth when they venture beyond the confines of home in search of a common humanity.

    (This description of the Adoration of the Korean was first published on the website of The University of Chicago Magazine.)

    Although Andrew Lawrence Crown has made this quality fiction available to readers for free, he is accepting donations through PayPal.