The Hive and the Honey

Written by Paul Yoon

Narrated by Raymond J. Lee

Winner of The Story Prize
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
A Time Top 10 Best Fiction Book of 2023 and Must Read Book of 2023
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Library Journal, Electric Literature, and the New York Public Library

“Expansive, haunting, and intimate, Paul Yoon’s new short story collection The Hive and the Honey…shows Yoon at the height of his powers.” —Sabir Sultan, Pen America

From the beloved award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a spectacular collection of unique stories, each confronting themes of identity, belonging, and the collision of cultures across countries and centuries.

A boy searches for his father, a prison guard, on Sakhalin Island. In Barcelona, a woman is tasked with spying on a prizefighter who may or may not be her estranged son. A samurai escorts an orphan to his countrymen in the Edo Period. A formerly incarcerated man starts a new life in a small town in upstate New York and attempts to build a family.

The Hive and the Honey is a “virtuosic” (Vanity Fair) collection by celebrated author Paul Yoon, one that portrays the vastness and complexity of diasporic communities, with each story bringing to light the knotty inheritances of their characters. How does a North Korean defector connect with the child she once left behind? What are the traumas that haunt a Korean settlement in Far East Russia?

“Absorbing...Yoon details fully realized and flawed characters attempting to wade through the complexities of immigrant life...[and] asks urgent questions about what it really means to belong somewhere.” —Time, 100 Must-Read Books of 2023

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781797162300

Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. .