Part 1 9 Rispenard Street
Part 2 Postman 125
Part 3 Vanity 313
Axiom of the Four-Part Equation 415

“A novel that dares to face the darkness of life.”
The life of a man who captivated readers around the world

“Inside the trash bag were eggshells, wilted lettuce, spoiled spaghetti, and you.” _From the text

Four college friends, Willem, Malcolm, JB, and Jude, begin their careers in New York City, each with their own dreams.
Willem is an actor, Malcolm is an architect, JB is a painter, and the main character, Jude, is a lawyer with a secret and painful past.
Despite his good looks and extraordinary brains, Jude has been secretive and has low self-esteem since his college days, but his friends accept and love him for who he is.
His friends don't know much about Jude, such as why he limps, why he has constant scars on his arms and back, how he lived as a child, and whether he has a family, but they don't ask because it makes Jude uncomfortable.

In fact, Jude was abandoned in a sack at birth and suffered horrific abuse while growing up in a monastery.
At the age of nine, he ran away from the monastery with a monk, but the outside world that awaited him was even more terrifying than the monastery.
Then, after entering college with the help of a social worker in his late teens, his life unfolded in a completely different way from his terrible past, as if “life was begging him to forgive me.”
Jude finds unbelievable happiness surrounded by his loving friends.
But as the happiness he never considered his own grows, memories of the past also become clearer, criticizing and mocking him in the present.
The greater the gap between past unhappiness and present happiness, the more difficult it is for him to bear his life.
How far does the hell of life extend and how far does the happiness of life extend?


This work depicts the life of a man who tried to overcome the injustice of the life given to him, a man who had to destroy himself to survive. It rejects even the slightest possibility of hope and forces us to face the pain of life head-on.

A writer who defies prediction and provokes the world
Hanya Yanagihara

“I wanted to capture the pain, fear, and love of life in the story of four men.” _Hanya Yanagihara

Hailed by critics as a “brutal masterpiece,” Little Life defies predictions and repeatedly shocks readers until the very end, but its author, Hanya Yanagihara, is no less unpredictable.
Yanagihara, who is a rare writer among the finalists for the Man Booker Prize, is neither a full-time writer nor one who simply maintains a side job to make a living.
Yanagihara worked at the world-renowned luxury travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler and is currently the deputy editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
It is a brilliant career for an author who has created a buzz with works that delve into the darkness of a human life to the limit.
Her author bio identifies her only as a “New Yorker,” obscuring all the complexities of her identity as an Asian-American female writer.

“Having a day job doesn’t mean I have less time to create, but it gives me the freedom to be a more creative artist,” says Yanagihara. He also wrote his second novel, “Little Life,” without fail, three hours a day during the week and six hours a day on weekends while working at the magazine, and as a result, he completed the masterpiece in 18 months.
Even though it is over a thousand pages long, it is an amazing work of creativity, but it is also a great achievement to be able to make the book so captivating that you cannot put it down, making those thousand pages seem insignificant.
Through this novel, which resonates so deeply that she herself said, “I wrote mostly at night, and the more I immersed myself in this dark world, the more relieved I felt when I went to work the next day,” Yanagihara has created a unique world of her own that has no connection to the materials commonly expected from Asian-American female writers.

“Painful or happy”
A man's face you can't take your eyes off of

The portrait on the cover of "Little Life" is the work of famous American photographer Peter Hujar, and it is said that Yanagihara had this photo in mind as the cover image from the beginning.
Peter Huza is known for his black-and-white portraits that capture the suffering, loneliness, and fear of death of the marginalized with a uniquely delicate and poignant gaze.
As Yanagihara said, “Something merciless and helpless in this photo reminded me of Jude and Willem, characters in my novel,” the face of the man who seems to be struggling to hold back tears is in line with the life of the protagonist in the novel, so it is not difficult to guess the author’s intention in taking this photo.
The publisher had no choice but to hesitate because of the title of this photo (ironically, the title of the work is [Orgasmic Man]), but eventually agreed with Yanagihara's suggestion to leave it up to the readers to decide whether "this man is in pain or in joy." As a result, the face of the "crying man" can now be seen in many countries around the world, including Korea, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden.