It is very, very hard for me to believe, but my debut collection is now two years old. Celebrate with me?
―Publishers Weekly
“In his latest, the Mary McCarthy Prize winning collection of 18 short-stories, Impossible Children (Sarabande Books), novelist Robert Yune clearly gets [‘showing’], using place and well-rendered, self-aware characters to great effect, making for some of the most compelling reading I’ve done in a while.”
―Pittsburgh Quarterly
“Touching upon diverse genres including science fiction, the fairy tale, and the Gothic tale, the interconnected short stories comprising Impossible Children are impressively and deftly crafted literary gems.”
―Midwest Book Review
“Robert Yune’s magnificent and richly assured debut, Impossible Children, takes us across the United States, from New Jersey to Michigan to Alaska, portraying the lives of the itinerant, the wanderers, and the lost. Like Stuart Dybek’s Coasts of Chicago or Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City, the stories―through a fully realized community―embody and evoke generations, history, and the history of war and migration. Many of the stories focus on the experience of Korean Americans, though one of the many striking aspects of this book is that it never stays within the borders of a single culture or community, but rather continuously expands across landscapes that are at once familiar and yet difficult to categorize in simple terms. This is a collection that is both precise―in language, in imagery and tone, revealing key moments in a life―and vast in geography, events, and the heart.”
―Paul Yoon, judge, April 2017
Robert Yune 