Cursed Bunny: Stories

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How to define the genre of this book? Maybe I would call it literary horror. Some stories have elements of fantasy others of SF, historical fiction, feminist literature but all share a horror flavour and are very well written (and translated). Most story dieal wtih some sort of trauma and some have a moral at the end. 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. 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.

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. Now a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Fiction. Winners announced Nov 15th** 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.BC: Cursed Bunny was our first collaboration. Afterwards Anton tried really hard to promote me, and it worked. He published “The Head” in the online magazine Samovar and published another short story entitled “The Mask” in Valancourt Book of Horror, Vol. II. It was fun. 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. Grandfather used to say, “When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.” - Cursed Bunny.

CHUNG: Fairy tales - usually, the European ones that we are kind of used to in the English-speaking world has a certain way of plot development. And I really love that structure, so I try to use it whenever it seems fun. And I add a Korean reality, the things that I see or the things that I heard from somebody else and wed that kind of magical twist to it. And I hope that adds some fresh elements to the familiar structure. Cursed Bunny is a collection of short stories inspired by Russian and Slavic fairytales, blending magic and horror to teach some critical lessons. So, my question like Duchamp's question when he placed a urinal, a piece of plumbing in an art gallery in New York, and called it "Fountain" - is it art? Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed: the title story tells of the slow, traumatic demise of a corporation’s CEO and his family after he is gifted a cursed object in revenge for his unsavoury business actions. And in ‘Snare’ the greed takes the form of the exploitation of natural resources: a down-and-out man finds a trapped fox that happens to bleed golden blood; he keeps the fox alive to sell its blood and begins to enjoy a life of riches with his new young family. But what follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell?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.

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. The title story Cursed Bunny (저주 토끼) begins with the quote that opens my review and tells the story of the narrator’s grandfather, who created cursed objects, such as the lamp shaped like a bunny rabbit, for his customers. In this case the cursed bunny was one he made to seek his own revenge (violating his own rules) on a company who had put a friend out of business by unscrupulous means, leading to the friend’s suicide. The lamp, once gifted to the CEO, creates chaos in the life of the CEO’s family and his business, but also with implications for the grandfather. From an author never before published in the United States, Cursed Bunny is unique and imaginative, blending horror, sci-fi, fairytales, and speculative fiction into stories that defy categorization. By turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, here monsters take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But in this unforgettable collection, translated by the acclaimed Anton Hur, Chung’s absurd, haunting universe could be our own, illuminating the ills of contemporary society. There is absolutely no reason this needed to be this damn long. And all this misery for what? He overcomes the evil so easily and then the story just ends and I am confused and unsatisfied.At their best, though, these stories use a vocabulary of the grotesque to articulate truths about female bodies, living in a patriarchy, and the brutal vampiric logic of capitalism. Surprisingly, there's little sense of place in these tales which could pretty much happen anywhere - except, ironically, the last one located in Poland. Cursed Bunny,” the titular story, is the meditation on capitalism and greed that we all need in this day and age. A consistent theme throughout the stories are the notions of trauma, abuse, and power on our everyday lives, whether it’s from an external force or via an internal force, such as a family member. “Cursed Bunny” tells the story through a narrator whose grandfather knew this tale. A CEO’s grandson is given a cursed bunny and slowly dies, while the family quite literally rots of greed.