[Event] Book Launch | I'll Love You Forever by Giaae Kwon

Pre-purchase your copy of the featured title to guarantee your signed copy! This helps ensure that everyone who wants a book goes home with one, in case we sell out at the event. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror meets Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings in a meditation that blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore how the author’s love affair with K-pop has shaped her sense of self, charting K-pop’s complex coming-of-age through some of its biggest idols.

I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan is a smart, poignant, constantly surprising essay collection that considers the collision between stratospherically popular music and our inescapably personal selves. Giaae Kwon delves into the global impact of K-pop artists, from H.O.T. to Taeyeon to IU to Suga of BTS, and reveals how each illuminated and shaped her own life.

In using intimate experiences to examine larger cultural topics, this singular work breaks new ground in its consideration of K-pop. Written from the perspective of a bilingual and bicultural Korean American, I'll Love You Forever blends the critical with the personal. Kwon interweaves profiles of different K-pop idols with ruminations on various aspects of Korean culture, from the country’s attitude toward plastic surgery and female sexuality to its obsession with academia. Combining insightful critique and adoring analysis, I’ll Love You Forever provides readers with a fuller picture of a culturally and socially complex industry and the machine and heart behind its popularity. Above all, Kwon offers up the passion of a superfan, finding joy in K-pop along the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Giaae Kwon is a food and culture writer whose work has appeared in Whetstone, Electric Literature, and Taste, among other publications. She wrote a column about K-pop for Catapult and attended the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2022. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, where she’s working on her next project, which explores Korean food through the lens of the diaspora.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Yoojin Grace Wuertz was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States at age six. She holds a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA in fiction from New York University. Her debut novel, EVERYTHING BELONGS TO US (Random House), was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and included on Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction of 2017. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She is the author of two picture books forthcoming from RISE x Penguin Workshop, and is currently revising a YA novel. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her family.