Samuel Perry, translator of From Wŏnso Pond, has given us a welcome translation into English of Kang Kyŏngae's (1906–44) seminal fictional work about peasant and proletariat exploitation and politicization in colonial Korea. The book follows the dramatic stories of three main characters, Sŏnbi, Ch'ŏtchae, and Kannani, and their paths from dispossession as peasants from an older, waning social structure into a no less exploitative condition in rapidly industrializing colonial cities. The transformations of these newly rising proletariats toward politicized awakening are contextualized in a richly informative translator's introduction. Perry's historically and critically informed introduction helps readers situate the complexity of the text from production to consumption, in its various contexts, from the colonial era to the postcolonial aftermath. The original title, Ingan Munje (人間問題), which can be literally translated as “The Human Predicament,” [the translated title refers to the legend of Wŏnso Pond that opens the narrative] was first serialized in 120 installments in The Tonga Daily from August 1, 1934 to December 22, 1934. It was compiled and published in book form posthumously and only at the end of the colonial era, appearing in by then partitioned North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) first in 1949 and in South Korea (Republic of Korea) in 1970. The translator has painstakingly returned to the colonial-era newspaper serial itself, scattered in various archives, in copies that are often difficult to decipher, for this translation. He reminds us, however, that the “authenticity of this serialized version is… also in doubt” (p. viii) as publications at the time were censored by the colonial government and marked by self-censorship by the authors themselves anticipating the censor's prohibitions. The challenge facing the translator in the absence of an “original” is symptomatic of colonial era cultural productions in general and is of particular significance in relation to Kang's oeuvre. Although Kang is a now considered the rare author who enjoys canonical status in at least three literary worlds: North Korea, South Korea, and the ethnic Korean minority community (Chosŏnjok) in China, this canonical status is of recent vintage. For almost half a century, the status of Kang and her works was anything but stable, marginalized for her national, gender, and class identifications. As a woman writer hailing from a peasant background and as a migrant who wrote primarily from Japan-occupied Manchuria, Kang was peripheral to colonial Korea's male-dominated literary world centered around Seoul and to the proletariat literary movements with which she was ideologically aligned. At the end of the colonial era, she was stigmatized in South Korea as a “writer who went north” (wŏlbuk chakka) and was not recognized until the thawing of cold war tensions in the 1980s. Along with transformations in global geopolitics, the rise of democracy movements and renewed interest in leftist and feminist works within South Korea in the 1980s and '90s set the stage for the “rediscovery” of Kang. For Kang, concerns of class exploitation are inseparable from concerns with gender inequalities, and this is evident in From Wŏnso Pond in which peasant and factory girls are sexually exploited by their male “overseers,” pushing them toward a politicized collective class consciousness. The story is clearly an example of proletariat or socialist realism in which art was to serve a distinct political purpose and offers a rare glimpse into the fast-paced transformations of the social and geopolitical landscape of colonial Korea. The translator's introduction expertly frames this history in the context of the Japanese empire as well as in broader world literary histories. One regrets some awkward or stilted renderings (for example, mixed colloquialisms in phrases such as “calling me bloody feudalist or whatever… where the hell do you get off treating me like that?” (151)), as well as an occasional typo and some mistranslations (in a note, the translator warns readers not to be confused by the similar names of two characters Yu Sŏbang and Yi Sŏbang, when the term Sŏbang is not a proper name but a title of respect that can be roughly translated as “mister” (7)). However, overall, this is an excellent translation, and the translator should be lauded for eloquently rendering such a difficult text and making it available to a larger audience. From Wŏnso Pond will be welcomed by general readers of world literature, as well as students and scholars of Korean and East Asian literature and history, and of global proletariat cultural productions and movements.