i was trying to eat a Delicious Treat while reading it between conference calls, and i was delivered a cosmic punishment i do not feel i deserved. The greatest horrors are the ones that feel very close to everyday reality and tend to revolve around the evils people can put others through, particularly for their own benefit. Scars covers an age-old trope of human sacrifice for a community as well as enslavement and abuse of an innocent child for profit, while Cursed Bunny (one of the most sinister good times in the whole book) is a revenge tale against a corporate CEO for having used his position of power and privilege to destroy a struggling family. The final story, Reunion, best exemplifies a theme that is an undercurrent of many of these stories: There are big kernels of truth to the reality we live in inside of the stories, so it’s not like it’s trying to be this way on purpose. Chung’s prose is like a knife, something that is very precise and clearly carefully deliberated upon when choosing its themes and subjects. The very first story is about a head appearing in a woman’s toilet, and she treats it with blatant disregard. I mustered my courage to dive into Bora Chung's collection thanks to Alan's unmissable and motivating review with succinct, informative and spoiler-free descriptions of every single short story in Cursed Bunny. I have the feeling my four-star rating for this book may be a bit overgenerous but I wanted to celebrate its uniqueness, the author's artistry at the grotesque, surrealist imagery and quirky humour evident even in the title of the collection. Finally, I want to congratulate the translator Anton Hur for having two of his works longlisted this year. Love in the Big City is the other one, which I also enjoyed.

Godammnit! I liked this one. It's about greed and how everything has a price. I was gasping at the twists in this short story. There are a couple of Grimm-like fables, Snare being a most disquieting effort about a fox that bleeds gold. Unfortunately, the longest story in the book Scars is also the most tedious one, an M. Night Shyamalan type thing about a boy sacrificed to a monster to save a village. Now a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Fiction. Winners announced Nov 15th** South Korean novelist Bora Chung’s first translated work, the short story collection “ Cursed Bunny,” is an example of the new amalgamated norm. Drawing from Korean folk tale and Chung’s expertise as a Slavic literature professor, the narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird.RASCOE: Yeah, I think it's probably more than just Korea, but it is a big issue. Like, being a single mother is a big issue all over. Well, I mean, what do you hope that English readers will get from this book? You have a beautiful story in there called "The Reunion," where you talk about, you know, what ties us to this world. What do you hope will tie readers to this book?

That’s the mood that would capture the vibe of the short stories perfectly, as they’re like horrific little fairytales that can really make you squeamish. That’s my warning going into this: you’re going to find some content in this book that may make you a little nauseous, so if you’re someone not into the grotesque, this isn’t the book for you at all. But for 202 Equally horrific is Snare, a fable-like narrative playing on Aesop’s The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. A man finds an injured fox that bleeds gold, and instead of freeing it, keeps it alive but constantly wounded and bleeding, so he can profit from its pain. Generational curses abound once again, and the man is forced to repeat his evils with his own loved ones, and so the pattern continues.

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Goodbye My Love (안녕, 내 사랑) has a designer of artificial companions deciding it’s time to replace her first robot, and her one true love, although the androids have other ideas. The story is also noticeable for a reference to the uncanny valley concept - one that neatly summarises the collection.

Another story that implicitly comments on the theme of selfishness is “Ruler of the Winds and Sands.” This story follows a blind prince and a benevolent princess that are soon to be wedded. The blind prince’s father claims that a sorcerer, known as the master of the golden ship, cursed the father’s lineage for cutting off the sorcerer’s arm in war. Three months before the princess and the prince’s wedding, the prince explains to his fiancé the story of the sorcerer and how their children will also be born blind. The nervous princess then sneaks out of the castle and with great courage asks the sorcerer to lift the curse for the prince and their future children. The sorcerer complies with her request, but says that he did not curse their family, but rather, ‘“they were cursed because they started the war. The air from the horizon to the sun and moon is a place man may not rule. My ship has sailed peacefully in that air since the dawn of time. It was the king of the desert blinded by his greed for gold, who first drew his weapon.”’ Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung’s stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it's almost impossible to put Cursed Bunnydown.”―Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble Bora Chung’s first English translated work, Cursed Bunny, is one of several literary works that remind the reader about the harsh cruelties of the world that are often difficult to swallow. Along with publishing three novels and two other short story collections, she also translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. None of her other works have been translated into English yet, but Cursed Bunny is an incredible beginning for English readers to understand complex ideologies from Chung’s perspective.

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In 2022, the English edition of her short story collection Cursed Bunny translated by Anton Hur was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. [2] The ten stories borrow from different genres, including magical realism, horror and science fiction. [1] [4] In September 2023 the book was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. [6]

BC:I trust Anton completely, and I leave him alone when he works. The result is always brilliant, as you can see. In “Goodbye My Love,” Anton gave Model One a gender because the English language requires it. So Anton made Model One a she. Model one is a robot, so by principle it doesn’t have gender and Model One as a woman kind of surprised me. It gave the story an undertone of a queer narrative, and I love it. I only want so little,” said the Head hastily, “I’m only asking that you keep dumping your body waste in the toilet so I can finish the rest of my body. Then I’ll go far away from here and live by my own means, so please, just keep using the toilet like you always have.” Grotesque monsters often serve as villains in children’s fairy tales. The monsters in Bora Chung’s story collection, Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur, are sometimes less obvious, but not less terrifying. The stories defy conventional categorization. They range from horror to fantasy to slightly supernatural, with the individual stories varying in how they integrate a mix of those elements into modern fables and parables. Contents The Head The Embodiment Cursed Bunny The Frozen Finger Snare Goodbye, My Love Scars Home Sweet Home Ruler of the Winds and Sands Reunion The stories effectively mix genres (anti-realist would perhaps be a good label) and also horror with humour.If the aesthetics of the book are the only thing of quality, think again; Cursed Bunny, is without any doubt, THE best short story collection I have read in a long time. South Korea’s Bora Chung’s short stories are brimming with horror, fairy tale elements and great doses of weirdness. This is a world where heads emerge from toilets, orphans acquire unknown superpowers, rabbits cause financial ruin and foxes bleed gold. RASCOE: Yeah. Well, that definitely happened in that story. You know, in a lot of your stories, I found a theme of women and the autonomy over their bodies and kind of, like, the horror and the tension that can come from not only just, like, what your body creates, intentionally or unintentionally, and the way society reacts to it. Like, what were you trying to get at with some of those stories? RASCOE: And I found the head, too. So "The Head" is about creations, and then "Embodiment" is about a girl who gets pregnant through her birth control somehow. She gets pregnant, and then it goes from there. Over the last couple of decades, literary fiction has increasingly unhinged its jaws to gulp down genre fiction, creating new, lumpy hybrids — Stephen Graham Jones’ bloodily stitched together literary slashers; Susanna Clarke’s magic potion of epic fantasy and realism; Kate Atkinson’s sliding doors of historical fiction and time travel. Scars” opens with the kidnapping of a nameless child, who is tossed into a cave. There he is ravaged by a bird-like monster that sinks its beak into his spine to feed, leaving behind hideous triangular scars. The boy grows up in the lightless void before managing to escape. But he’s immediately captured by an unscrupulous bald man who has him fight rabid dogs in an arena. From there … well, things don’t get any better.