Impossible Fairy Tale

Winner of a PEN Heim award

The Impossible Fairy Tale tells the story of the nameless ‘Child’, who struggles to make a mark on the world, and her classmate Mia, whose spoiled life is everything the Child's is not.

At school, adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by soul-crushing hierarchies and an underlying menace. Then, one day after hours, the Child sneaks into the classroom to add ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks, setting in motion a series of cataclysmic events.

Graywolf Press will publish The Impossible Fairy Tale in North America in March 2017.

PRAISE
‘The Impossible Fairy Tale is extraordinary. Disturbing and visceral in its depiction of the savagery of childhood, yet uplifting in its reinvention of literary form. A novel of hypnotic language, page-turning suspense and mind-bending metafictional twists, The Impossible Fairy Tale is the most eerie and fearlessly experimental work I have encountered in recent years.’
— Susan Barker

‘A haunting, spellbinding tale about violent obsession and the immense and frightening force of an unquiet conscience.’
— Sara Baume

‘Is this a horror story or a memoir, a work of theory or a riddle? No doubt about it, Han Yujoo is a brave and intelligent writer.’
— Lara Pawson

Han Yujoo is the author of The Impossible Fairytale. She was born in Seoul in 1982, studied German literature at Hongik University, obtained a master's degree in aesthetics from the prestigious Seoul National University, and is currently working toward another master's degree in comparative literature from Seoul National University. She is also a noted translator, whose works include translations of Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, and Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful and The Ongoing Moment, among others, into Korean. In addition, she runs her own micro-press, Oulipo Press, focusing on experimental fiction.