Lighthouse Bookshop’s Women in Translation Book Club continues with Unexpected Vanilla by Lee Hyemi, translated by Soje.

*Please buy the book from the Lighthouse if you're going to join our book club, this helps cover the cost of running these bookclubs for free!

You can order online for delivery or collection using WomenInTranslation as the discount code or THIS LINK to get 10% off the book (the discount is automatically applied & will be visible at checkout).

For our final bookclub of 2020 we're having a slightly more laid back session, with a tiny book and a chance to also discuss the books that got us excited/ helped us survive 2020 and what we're looking forward to read next.

Have a mug of something hot and spicy and some mince pies/gingerbread/winter baking of your choice to hand, and join us for the final book club session of the year!

What tiny book will it be? Well, it's Lee Hyemi's s stunning Unexpected Vanilla, translated from Korean by Soje.

Lee Hyemi’s poetry is characterized by fluidity and wetness, with subjects moving about and soaking in each other through curious means.

Unexpected Vanilla’s exchange of liquids often involves sex, but intercourse can be nonsexual: drinking tea or alcohol, going to the beach, sitting in the same tub, crying, feeling your lover’s sweat on your palm. In this way, Lee explores a wide variety of relationships, attractions, and sensations. Her erotically charged, surrealist sensibility can be traced back to the paintings of Leonor Fini, a bisexual Argentinian artist whom she admires. Lee subverts the titular “vanilla” norm without denying its pleasures.

Detailing various intimacies in her “world of the second person,” which feels clandestine but safe from the threat of exposure, Lee explores the Korean language’s scope for ambiguous gendering. The task of the queer translator is to feel out the subtleties with respect, as one does in life, and not presume heterosexuality. Just as Lee spoke out during the 2016 hashtag movement that began calling out sexual violence within South Korean literary circles, her poems recreate and hold space for agency and queerness in female sexuality.

The reading group, led by poet and translator Annie Rutherford, provides a free, friendly and gentle environment in which opinions are shared and new appreciations can be discovered. A gathering for curious minds and relaxed conversation centered on the book, come and join our warm bookish group – all are welcome.