Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Choi Jin-young - The only two works that should be attributed to CHOI JIN-YOUNG are Hunger (translated by Soje) and TO THE WARM HORIZON (translated by Soje). The correct biog is this, taken from Hachette website:

Choi Jin-young is one of South Korea’s best-known authors. Her career started in 2006 when she won the Silcheon Literature Debut Author Award. She has since won many more, including the Shin Dong-yup Literary Prize, Manhae Literary Prize and, most recently, the Yi Sang Literary Award.

In terms of the book itself, the description on the English-language Brazen Books hardback, paperback, kindle, and audio should also read as per the Hachette website:

THE KOREAN CULT CLASSIC PHENOMENON

YOU ARE W̶H̶A̶T̶ WHO YOU EAT

No gun, no law, no God could stop me now. Only him.

A woman finds her man murdered on the street – and time stands still.

Until she cradles his corpse to her chest and carries it home, where she disinfects every inch of skin before seating herself to begin. What follows reverberates from this realm into the next, where the man is witnessing his own funeral.

Together, the lovers lament a lifetime of working themselves to the bone in a country sucking everyone dry – but time’s up. The woman is already eating and beating capitalism at its own barbaric game, entombing the body in her own where her soulmate will live again.

The word-of-mouth literary sensation on everyone’s lips, Hunger is a psychologically and philosophically thrilling cult classic that cuts to the very heart of love, money, and the things they do to us.

‘A feast for the literary senses’ ANTON HUR, Judge of the International Booker Prize

‘A work of creative genius’ BARBARA ZITWER, Agent of Nobel Prize-winning The Vegetarian

Mostly done.

I removed several incorrectly attributed books whose authors were listed incorrectly, and also removed a few of real Choi Jin-young's books that are only published in Korean (which don't have a corresponding English translation).

The currently remaining books all have "Choi Jin-young" as the author on its cover.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... This has multiple authors. One of them is Choi Jin-young (the same author of Hunger and To the Warm Horizon)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
The author of this book is also Choi Jin-young, but a different person. I added a space between "Choi" and "Jin-young", so she will appear as a separate author. (See "Separating authors with the same name" in the Librarian Manual for the details) So this book is not going to appear anymore.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
This has "Choi Jin-young" as its translator. This is also a different person. I tried adding a space in her name too, but it looks the space trick only works for the first author, so I can't fix it in the translator's name.


About the book description, it looks fine to me. I replied here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Thank you so much, Heejin! :) I work for the agent/publisher of Choi Jin-young so it's great to have you help with this.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... - I have checked and this must be a different Choi Jin-young. Please remove from the profile as well.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5... - this is not her either, please remove too.

In terms of the book description, Choi has made a few but critical tweaks to the summary that better reflect the rather complex storyline (taking place between this world and 'heaven' or the other realm) and it's success in Korea, so please do change eBook, audio, hardback and paperback to the below. I appreciate you want to limit marketing hype/blurb so I have kept that stuff to only one endorsement (from the International Booker Prize)

THE KOREAN CULT CLASSIC PHENOMENON

YOU ARE WHO YOU EAT

‘A feast for the literary senses’ ANTON HUR, Judge of the International Booker Prize

No gun, no law, no God could stop me now. Only him.

A woman finds her man murdered on the street – and time stands still.

Until she cradles his corpse to her chest and carries it home, where she disinfects every inch of skin before seating herself to begin. What follows reverberates from this realm into the next, where the man is witnessing his own funeral.

Together, the lovers lament a lifetime of working themselves to the bone in a country sucking everyone dry – but time’s up. The woman is already eating and beating capitalism at its own barbaric game, entombing the body in her own where her soulmate will live again.

The word-of-mouth literary sensation on everyone’s lips, Hunger is a psychologically and philosophically thrilling cult classic that cuts to the very heart of love, money, and the things they do to us.

> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... - I have checked and this must be a different Choi Jin-young. Please remove from the profile as well.

That IS the same author. If you work for the publisher of Choi Jin-young I think you should be aware?
This is the original Korean book, "사라지는 건 여자들뿐이거든요"'s publisher page: http://ehbook.co.kr/book/26978
And the paragraph below is what describes Choi Jin-young in that page:
```
최진영

1981년 출생. 2006년 《실천문학》신인상으로 작품활동을 시작했으며, 장편소설 《당신 옆을 스쳐간 그 소녀의 이름은》 《끝나지 않는 노래》 《나는 왜 죽지 않았는가 》와 소설집 《팽이 》가 있다. 한겨레문학상, 신동엽문학상을 수상했다.

최진영의 다른 책들
소설, 한국을 말하다 / 장강명, 곽재식, 구병모, 이서수, 이기호, 김화진, 조경란, 김영민, 김멜라, 정보라, 구효서, 손원평, 이경란, 백가흠, 정이현, 정진영, 김혜진, 강화길, 김동식, 최진영, 천선란
구의 증명 / 최진영
악스트 Axt 2020.01-02 / 최진영
구의 증명 / 최진영
```

You can translate the text using Google translate. "구의 증명" is "Hunger" (The name is apparently not the direct translation of the original title)

You can also check Choi's Korean Wikipedia page: https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%B5%...
It lists "사라지는 건 여자들뿐이거든요", which is the original title of this book, as one of her co-authored books.


> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5... - this is not her either, please remove too.

As I said, it's not we can freely add/remove books from the author page. Books with the same author name all appear in the same page. That's why that space trick I mentioned exists, which is rather a hacky one, I agree, but that's the only thing Goodreads provides. And as I also said, that trick apparently does not work on non-first authors (such as translators). So I don't think I can do anything more here. That translator's name is also Choi Jin-young.

EDIT: This was incorrect, and the trick works for non-first authors. The translator has been removed from this author's profile.


About the blurb:
I don't think authors normally themselves make tweaks in blurbs? Do they check every bookstore and requests tweaks for them? Also, given that Choi Jin-young has not even claimed her profile in Goodreads yet, I wonder if she really would care about sentence phrasing in the blurbs on this site?

Having said that, that blurb matches what Amazon has, so I changed the book's English editions' description to match that, modulo a few endorsement lines (which I don't think would have anything to do with Choi's alleged tweaking)

janecita wrote: "Choi Jin-young - The only two works that should be attributed to CHOI JIN-YOUNG are Hunger (translated by Soje) and TO THE WARM HORIZON (translated by Soje). The correct biog is t..."

No need to remove books that haven't been published in English. Goodreads allows those.

Also, the space in the name *does* work for second authors, translators, etc. I have separated the translator into their own profile. The reason it didn't appear to work may be that it sometimes takes time for these kinds of changes to show up in the live database.

Ma wrote: "janecita wrote: "Choi Jin-young - The only two works that should be attributed to CHOI JIN-YOUNG are Hunger (translated by Soje) and TO THE WARM HORIZON (translated by Soje). The ..."

Thanks for clarifying, and sorry for the confusion. Now I see that translator has been removed from the profile.

Per her already removed Korean books, I'll leave them that way for now, given that she has many more Korean-only books that don't have her English names attached, and I'm not sure whether we should add her English name to all of them.

Korean only books should have the English name first, to bring all the author's books together on that main author pagge. Then they should also have the author's Korean name listed as the second author. Same for translators, illustrators, etc. The books should have both English and Korean names listed.

In case you have any translations into a third language, the first author should be the English name and the second should be the name in the third language. In that case, the Korean name would not be included.

Ma wrote: "Korean only books should have the English name first, to bring all the author's books together on that main author pagge. Then they should also have the author's Korean name listed as the second au..."

True, but this is very hard to enforce consistently in practice. Usually a Korean author would publish a number of books in Korean before one or a few of their work gets published internationally. And to be consistent with the rule, as soon as one of their work is published internationally, we have to add their English name to every Korean book that's published so far even though most of them are not in English. Most of the time this does not happen. In some cases an author has dozens of books published in their local language and only one of their book is translated in English. It is very hard to add the author's English name to all existing books, and more importantly, we don't have any notification when that should happen.

I seriously think GoodReads should adopt a better author-classifying system where an author gets a unique ID that's not determined by the English name and can be associated with multiple names in different languages.

Thank you both for all your wonderful help ironing out these minor issues with the author's profile! I created this topic and would now like to delete it, if that's okay?

Why would you want to delete it?

Also I don't think you can delete the whole topic. Others' comments will remain, and only with your comments missing, they are not going to make sense.

Ma wrote: "Korean only books should have the English name first, to bring all the author's books together on that main author pagge. Then they should also have the author's Korean name listed as the second au..."
I'd love to see Goodreads adopt a better system for collocating books by the same author, one more like what libraries use. (I'm a librarian in real life as well as on Goodreads). However, it's not very likely to happen. The re-programming would be massive and I don't see Amazon willing to invest that much in the platform.

Heejin wrote: "Ma wrote: "Korean only books should have the English name first, to bring all the author's books together on that main author pagge. Then they should also have the author's Korean name listed as th..."

My pleasure!

They haven't done anything but cosmetic updates in years.

Hello, Thank you so much for your help.

Please could you add the author photo and biography to her profile.

Choi Jin-young is one of Korea’s most celebrated authors. Her career started in 2006 when she won the Silcheon Literature Debut Author Award. She has since won many more including the Hankyoreh Literary Award, Shin Dong-yup Literary Prize, Baek Shin-ae Literature Award, Manhae Literary Award and, most recently, the Yi Sang Literary Award.

Hunger has sold nearly half a million copies and charted for over half a year, breaking records for literary fiction in South Korea.

I added a biography. Author photos are problematic. If you can provide a photo that you can prove is in the public domain, we can use it. Otherwise, the author can claim her profile and add her own photo.