Taller Macondo

I'm a bookworm ajeossi. I plan books, translate them, edit them, design them, and send them out. I have written three of my own, but writing is one of the trades in the shop, not the shop itself.

Every book starts the same way: as a reader, wishing a particular book existed and finding that nobody had made it. A bilingual collection of Spanish and Latin American stories, in Spanish and Korean. A picture book running in three languages at once. And a novel that builds an artificial mind on the eight-consciousness model of Yogācāra Buddhism, installs it in a humanoid body, and asks whether such a mind can reach liberation.

No publisher was going to make any of them. That is usually how I know a book is worth making.

I studied physics and religious studies at Sogang University, and Spanish at Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies — which is roughly the set of obsessions these books come out of. I work for the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and the workshop runs in the hours around that.

The workshop takes its name from García Márquez's village — a place that shouldn't quite exist, and then does.

The books are for language learners, and for readers who like being somewhere other than where they started.