Cursed Bunny: Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

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Cursed Bunny is a creepy good time with something for everyone if only you dare to enter Bora Chung’s nightmares. For those curious, her award winning story The Head can be read here. These sharp social critiques and eerie stories are so well balanced and so much fun, I certainly will be thinking about them for a long time to come. Especially on dark and stormy nights… I shall take this opportunity to be ridiculously ambitious and say: Octavia Butler. A girl can dream. 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. 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.” This layout of the human mouth was hanging on the wall. I remember the five basic tastes that the human tongue can discern, written around the picture of the tongue. I was maybe five or six.

Five authors of Korean thrillers you should be reading: You-Jeong Jeong, Un-Su Kim, Young-Ha Kim, J.M. Lee and Hye-Young Pyun With the very real risk of being called a party pooper, a spoil-sport, old-fashioned and worse, I think Bora Chung's short story collection is bitter, sour, cruel, depressing, and yes ultimately evil. I took the first story seriously thinking that she was making a strong comparison between the haves and have nots - but by the end I was laughing because of the un-erasable image of that woman emerging from the toilet, with her wet hair hanging over her face - The Ring, horror film 2002 - anyone? Ok, so she's climbing out of a tv. It is published by Honford Star whose mission is to publish the best literature from East Asia, be it classic or contemporary ... By working with talented translators and exciting local artists, we hope to see more bookshelves containing beautiful editions of the East Asian literature we love. The book is the debut short story collection by the Korean author, Bora Chung. I’ve had this strange book on my radar before it was longlisted for the Booker. A few of my GR friends raved about it and it prompted me to read a sample story I found on the internet. The story is called The Embodiment, a harrowing example of body horror and it still one of my favorites from the collection.i am a weak person, but...i am physically incapable of having any opinions on this story beyond how disgusting it is.

In “The Head,” the first story of the collection, a woman is haunted by a floating head who lives in her toilet. The head explains how it came to be from the woman’s discarded waste. The head is a haunted image, resembling “a lump of carelessly slapped-together yellow and grey clay, with a few scattered clumps of wet hair. No ears, no eyebrows. Two slits for eyes.” The repulsive-looking head is the product of feces and clumps of hair. The head follows the woman wherever she goes through the sewer system, manifesting whenever she uses a toilet.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. Bora Chung (born 1976) is a South Korean writer and translator. Her collection of short stories, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. Surreal and grotesque, with gestures towards supernatural, fabular and weird fiction, this is a mixed bag of stories. The first half of the collection was better for me (The Head, The Embodiment, Cursed Bunny, The Frozen Finger, Snare) then there's a transitional AI/speculative fiction entry with Goodbye My Love that feels over-familiar even to me and I rarely read in that genre but it's similar to Machines Like Me, Klara and the Sun, Little Eyes. The final four longer tales just didn't really work for me and feel like Chung is trying things out without the assurance of voice and vision that characterises the early stories. 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.