Is there an audiobook of The Hive and the Honey: Stories?

Yes. The Hive and the Honey: Stories has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Raymond J. Lee.

How long is the The Hive and the Honey: Stories audiobook?

The The Hive and the Honey: Stories audiobook runs 4 hr 35 min.

Is The Hive and the Honey: Stories on Kindle Unlimited?

No. The Hive and the Honey: Stories was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 9, 2026.

The Hive and the Honey: Stories by Paul Yoon book cover for the Book of the Day short stories book review

Our score

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to The Hive and the Honey: Stories free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDOctober 2023

Genres

Fiction Short Stories Literary Fiction

Themes

The Korean diaspora across four centuriesDisplacement and belongingStrangers building homes in foreign placesWhat gets inherited and what gets carried

The Hive and the Honey: Stories

Name: The Hive and the Honey: Stories
Price: 13.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon

The Hive and the Honey is Paul Yoon's Story Prize-winning collection of spare, haunting short stories about the Korean diaspora, moving from Edo-period Japan to Sakhalin Island to upstate New York. Literary short fiction about displacement and belonging, written with severe restraint and a surprising amount of tenderness.

The Review

Our take

Reading this collection feels like being handed photographs from branches of a family you never knew you had. Each story opens somewhere new: a settlement on Sakhalin Island, a post station in seventeenth-century Japan, a gym in Barcelona, a small town in upstate New York where a man just out of prison is trying to assemble a life from a rented room and a job. The people are Korean, or of Korean descent, and almost none of them are in Korea. Yoon gives you a few pages of plain, careful detail, then a single line that reorganizes everything you just read. It happens story after story, and it never stops feeling like a small ambush.

The prose is as spare as anything being published right now, and the spareness is doing real work. Yoon writes displacement through logistics: papers, trains, borrowed names, a meal set down in front of a stranger without questions. A samurai escorting an orphan boy to his countrymen becomes a story about what protection means between people with no shared language. A woman in Barcelona asked to spy on a prizefighter who may be her son spends the story studying the way he moves, and the surveillance turns into something closer to prayer. Whole decades of grief get carried in a gesture. When a sentence finally opens up and lets feeling through, it lands hard precisely because everything around it stayed so level.

My favorite here is the Sakhalin story, a son searching for his prison-guard father across an island that empire keeps renaming. It holds the collection's whole method in miniature: history supplies the cruelty, Yoon supplies the tenderness, and neither is allowed to shout. The title story reaches furthest back in time and reads like a fable that refuses to become one, staying stubbornly concrete about labor, weather, and what sweetness costs to produce.

The restraint does ask something of you. Several stories end mid-breath, on an image rather than an outcome, and if you need to know what happened to these people, Yoon is not going to tell you. A few pieces are so compressed they slide past before their weight registers, and at 159 pages the collection can be finished in an evening, which is the wrong way to read it. One story a night is closer to the right dosage. Read that way, the echoes between pieces start to sound: the same gestures recurring across four hundred years, strangers extending small, unexplained kindnesses, homes assembled out of nearly nothing on someone else's land.

Why you should read

Readers of Claire Keegan and Jhumpa Lahiri
Fans of Yoon's Run Me to Earth
Short-fiction readers who prize restraint over plot
Anyone drawn to diaspora stories across history

What to expect

Very spare prose with wide white space
Stories that end on images, not resolutions
Settings that jump countries and centuries
A slim book best rationed, not binged

The title turns out to be the thesis. A hive is a home built in a borrowed field, and honey gets made wherever the hive happens to land. These stories, scattered across empires and centuries, keep watching people make it.

Reviewed by Avery · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.2/ 5

Excellent

Listen to The Hive and the Honey: Stories free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Hive and the Honey: Stories?: Yes. The Hive and the Honey: Stories has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Raymond J. Lee.
Listen to The Hive and the Honey: Stories free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the The Hive and the Honey: Stories audiobook?: The The Hive and the Honey: Stories audiobook runs 4 hr 35 min.
Is The Hive and the Honey: Stories on Kindle Unlimited?: No. The Hive and the Honey: Stories was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 9, 2026.

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Common questions

What is The Hive and the Honey: Stories about?: Reading this collection feels like being handed photographs from branches of a family you never knew you had. Each story opens somewhere new: a settlement on Sakhalin Island, a post station in seventeenth-century Japan, a gym in Barcelona, a small town in upstate New York where a man just out of…
Is The Hive and the Honey: Stories worth reading?: We scored The Hive and the Honey: Stories 4.2 out of 5. The Hive and the Honey is Paul Yoon's Story Prize-winning collection of spare, haunting short stories about the Korean diaspora, moving from Edo-period Japan to Sakhalin Island to upstate New York. Literary short fiction about displacement and belonging, written with severe…