And as Hyun Sook soon discovered, in a totalitarian regime, the delights of discovering great works of illicit literature are quickly overshadowed by fear and violence as the walls close in. Instead she found herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground banned book club. When the handsome young editor of the school newspaper invited her to his reading group, she expected to pop into the cafeteria to talk about Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Scarlet Letter. In this charged political climate, with Molotov cocktails flying and fellow students disappearing for hours and returning with bruises, Hyun Sook sought refuge in the comfort of books. This was during South Korea's Fifth Republic, a military regime that entrenched its power through censorship, torture, and the murder of protestors. But literature class would prove to be just the start of a massive turning point, still focused on reading but with life-or-death stakes she never could have imagined.

After acing her exams and sort-of convincing her traditional mother that it was a good idea for a woman to go to college, she looked forward to soaking up the ideas of Western Literature far from the drudgery she was promised at her family’s restaurant. The Banned Book Club will be published this month by Iron Circus Comics.When Kim Hyun Sook started college in 1983 she was ready for her world to open up.

In this 11-page excerpt Hyun Sook meets the members of the Banned Book Club who will transform her life as a student and as a citizen. Hyun Sook’s irresistible memoir conveys her political (and social) awakening with equal measures of hilarity and comedy alongside moments of sheer terror as her eyes are opened to the brutal nature of the regime. But instead of discussing Moby Dick in a cafe, Hyun Sook finds herself, and her fearless pro-democracy book club classmates, forced into hiding under threat of arrest or worse by a repressive government at war with the freedom to read almost anything. She is thrilled to meet the handsome editor of the school’s student newspaper, who invites her to join his student reading club. Although the campus has erupted in violent student protests against the government, Hyun Sook, an apolitical freshman enthralled with literature and books, is uninvolved and fearful of her mother who disapproves of the protests and is dubious about her being in college at all. Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyung-Ju, and Ryan Estrada is the true story of Hyun Sook’s years as a South Korean college student under the brutal military regime of the early 1980s.