The dark side of rapid development emerges in The Dwarf, the bestselling Korean novel by Cho Se-hŭi. Critically lauded since it was first published in 1978, The Dwarf is a tale of breakneck industrialization, the painful costs it imposes on a disoriented working class and the spiritual malaise it brings to new elites. Cho's deceptively plain narration with its rapidly shifting points of view evokes the zeitgeist of South Korea in the late 1970s and his subject resonates in a world still grappling with the consequences of globalization.