Cursed Bunny: Stories

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Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy nearly any of the stories in this collection. While I didn't hate them, I was always left at the end of each one wanting more. Not longer stories, but more depth. More context, more specificity, more explanation. The last story in the collection, ironically, was great! It felt like it had something to say and it used the subversion of genre and expectations to do so, giving the main character more depth than any of the others that had come before. Haven’t finished reading: Janusz Zajdel was a Polish nuclear physicist and a SF writer with an amazing dystopian vision. I started reading his novel entitled Van Troff’s Cylinder ( Cylinder Van Troffa, 1980) but then I started translating other Polish books at the same time and got busy with deadline etc and had to stop reading and focus on the translation first. This happens all the time. But I was translating Polish books at the time so Zajdel would’ve understood, I hope. Should really finish the Cylinder though. Chi Tai-we’s ‘The Membranes,’ finally out in English, is dated as sci-fi, but its mind-bending narrative was a prescient exploration of identity. Billed as a weird collection of genre-bending short stories, the International Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny made waves in 2022 upon the release of its English translation. It received recognition for its bold, disturbing, and thought-provoking stories. Bora Chung undoubtedly has a vivid imagination. These stories cross many worlds and experiences, often with little to no context or explanation. For readers that can embrace that ambiguity, this will surely compel them. I am not such a reader.

Chung has written three novels and three collections of short stories. [4] [3] She lists as her literary influences the works of Park Wan-suh, Bruno Schulz, Bruno Jasieński, Andrei Platonov and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, [2] as well as Samguk yusa folktales. [4] In 1998, she won a Yonsei Literature Prize for her short story The Head. [5] She is also a recipient of second prizes at the Digital Literature Awards (2008) and Gwacheon Science Center SF Awards (2014). [5] 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. 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.

CHUNG: It's less dangerous if you are aware that you're never going to understand this. I think Isaac Asimov said something to that effect. But as long as we believe that we are gods, that we've created this, so this thing will always listen to me and do as I say, then we are walking into deeper trouble. The stories then moved towards heavier, somewhat sadder dark fantasy territory. I am not a great fan of fantasy or fairy tales and that was prevalent in the longer writings of “Ruler of the Winds and Sands”, “Snare” or “Scars” which can teach much about the exploitative nature of humans. There’s even some good science fiction hidden in the scary folds of AI brains. Okay, allllllllright. This one had potential. It is eerie, atmospheric, and unsettling. Confusing though. But I actually really enjoyed it........dammnit. A girl whose brother feeds on her blood, robots that take revenge on their owner and a bunny lamp with a deadly curse. Those are some of the bizarre, twisted plot lines in "Cursed Bunny," Bora Chung's first collection of short stories to appear in English, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It was translated from Korean by Anton Hur. Author Bora Chung joins us now to talk about her collection. Welcome to the show. Bora Chung was born in 1976, in Seoul. [1] Her parents were dentists. [2] She completed graduate studies in Russian and East European area studies at Yale University, then went on to gain a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. [1] [3] She taught the Russian language, literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University. [1] [4] She is a social activist. [4]

A series of nightmares is one way to describe Bora Chung’s cursed tales, the English translation of which was nominated for this year’s Booker Prize. The fictional short-stories blend the genres of magical realism, horror, fantasy and folklore, with some of those reading like critiques of social standards upheld by contemporary society (that don’t just pertain to South Korea). In ‘The Head’, for instance, a woman is confronted by a creature who lives inside her toilet, and who is made up of all the woman’s bodily effluence. Disgusted, she does her best to dispose of it, only to find it reemerging decades later, having grown into a beautiful young version of herself – and a vengeful one at that. It’s a story that speaks to the demands of ‘feminine perfection’ – a rejection of the abject parts of us and the weight of social taboos. In ‘The Embodiment’, a young woman finds herself pregnant – a side effect (in this bizarre world) of taking contraception pills for too long; she is pressured by an unsympathetic midwife into finding a father to help her raise ‘a normal child’, but upon failing, gives birth to a wriggling amorphous blob of blood. What a woman chooses to do with her body is of no consequence.An assorted collection of short stories by Bora Chung. The cover was enough reason for me to jump into it. Some really nice finds, some not. My toilet is no longer the safe place I once knew, and I’m never touching a bunny lamp no matter what. A great start with some really outstanding stories, the momentum gradually diminishing until by the end I was just eager to finish to move on.

RASCOE: Well, I mean, it's pretty much - it's the Frankenstein issue, right? Or Frankenstein's monster, right? Like, you create something that you don't have any understanding of, and then it terrorizes you because it's dangerous to create things you don't understand - right? - or to play God. 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. I was ready to DNF after this one. This is pointless and confusing. What a long way of saying that you shouldn't spread hate because it will consume you. One of the things I liked most was the genre-bending aspect of the short stories in Cursed Bunny. For instance, Goodbye my love has some elements of science fiction, Scars of fantasy, Reunion of a ghost and love story, Snare of a myth or fairytale. Interestingly, Bora Chung's stories showcase even level which is not often the case in collections. As for my personal preferences, the closer to magical realism or fantasy and farther from typical horror, the better. The two stories which I liked the best are Scars and Ruler of the Winds and Sands. There was a big potential in Snare also but it turned out too dark for my liking. Oddly, the title story, Cursed Bunny, appealed to me the least. An added bonus for me: Reunion is set in an unnamed city in Poland which resembles Cracow and there are even some sentences in Polish. escalating into full-on wails. Whether they were tears of relief, sadness from losing the baby, or of something else entirely, she herself couldn’t tell.CHUNG: Yeah, it's just in my particularly perverted story, the person gets pregnant. So yeah, listen to your doctor. Throughout the story, the woman’s concerns about the head are ignored by her family, who encourage her to leave the head alone and tell her it’s not a big deal. Her family refuses to validate her fears. Eventually, the woman capitulates, allowing the head to coexist unmolested. Among non-Korean writers, Polish writers Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), Bruno Jasienski (1901-1938 or 1940), and Russian writers Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (1938-). Jasienski and Platonov were both revolutionaries, in reality and in art, who focused on the human experience of pain, suffering and loss. Bruno Schulz is magical; he paints delicate and dream-like pictures in words and his stories read like a beautiful labyrinth. Petrushevskaya shows how women struggle in an unjust society, how women are human beings with all our strength and weakness and flaws and hopes and despairs, and how women live and survive. Her stories are breathtaking.

One of the most captivating short stories that describes the complex emotions of selfishness, greed, and revenge is titled, “Cursed Bunny.” The story is told through the lens of a grandson whose grandfather repeatedly tells him the story of a “cursed bunny.” The story revolves around a cursed bunny lamp that was made for the grandfather’s friend. According to the grandfather, his friend’s distillery company was ruined by a greedy competitor who spread lies about their drinks. The grandfather explains that “they claimed that anyone who drank [their drinks] would become blind, lame, or even fatally poisoned. Sales for my grandfather’s friend took a nosedive.”a bunch of my favorite subjects in one: ghosts, sadness, the meaning of life, people-watching, lovers. It was probably more accurate to refer to it as “a thing that vaguely looks like a head” than an actual head. It was about two-thirds the size of an adult’s head and resembled a lump of carelessly slapped-together yellow and gray clay, with a few scattered clumps of wet hair. No ears, no eyebrows. Two slits for eyes so narrow that she couldn’t tell if its eyes were open or closed. The crushed mound beneath was meant to be its nose. The mouth was also a lipless slit. Its strained speech mixed with the gurgling of a person drowning, making it difficult to understand. Cursed Bunny is a collection of short stories inspired by Russian and Slavic fairytales, blending magic and horror to teach some critical lessons. Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions – bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life. Don’t read this book while eating – but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.’