Like a family in a home, fantastic stories gather together in this book. The stories not only take their revenge, but also love you, and comfort you. You’ll end up completely endeared to this fascinating collection!”
New York Times Bestselling author Kyung-sook Shin
10/17/2022
Chung debuts with a well-crafted and horrifying collection of dark fairy tales, stark revenge fables, and disturbing body horror. In “The Head,” a woman is terrorized by a creature in her toilet. In “The Frozen Finger,” a woman awakes in the dark, unsure how her car got stuck in the mud, and follows a voice before learning of the danger it leads her to. In “Snare,” a fox bleeds gold and curses the merchant who keeps her captive; her curse is enacted horrifically through the merchant’s own children. “Scars” features a nameless boy who escapes endless tortures in a monster’s cave only to find pain and horror in the world of men. In “Goodbye, My Love,” a woman falls in love with an “artificial companion” but comes to a shocking realization when she attempts to replace the AI with a newer model. The strangely touching “Home Sweet Home” starts as a somewhat traditional story of a woman whose hard work is taken for granted by her ne’er-do-well husband, but their house holds a powerful secret that brings her happiness. Clever plot twists and sparkling prose abound. Chung’s work is captivating and terrifying. (Dec.)
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE, FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE, AND WINNER OF A PEN/HEIM TRANSLATION GRANT Cursed Bunny mines those places where what we fear is true and what is true meet and separate and re-meet. The resulting stories are indelible. Haunting, funny, gross, terrifying—and yet when we reach the end, we just want more."—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Ed Park, author of Personal Days Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review Chicago Review of Books Rhoda Feng, Vulture Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review) Kirby Beaton, Buzzfeed’s Best December Books of 2022 Louisa Ermelino, Publishers Weekly Kyung-sook Shin, New York Times Bestselling author of Please Look After Mom and Violets Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Kate Folk, author of Out There —Ms. Magazine Wired Magazine Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face Cursed Bunny aims to unsettle. It's as assured and brilliant as a nightmare. With an unflinching gaze and a sly humor, Chung has built a world both unfamiliar and eerily familiar, whose truths echo into our own. The indelible work of a master.”—Shruti Swamy, author of The Archer and A House is a Body LitHub Cursed Bunny is [Chung’s] first book to be translated into English, and hopefully not the last.”—Connie Biewald, San Francisco Chronicle Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung blend elements of horror, fantasy and the surreal, each is viscerally rooted in the real fears and pressures of everyday life.”—International Booker Prize judges —Publishers Weekly The West Trade Review We Are Bookish Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness BookReporter The Atlantic Scary Stories to Read in the Dark , Bora Chung writes for you. 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 Bunny down. In short, this collection may, in fact, be a cursed object in the best possible way.” —Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble
You’ll end up completely endeared to this fascinating collection.”
New York Times bestselling author Kyung-sook Shin
Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts.”
"[Chung’s] glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur, is poised to shock and delight. Bizarrely enigmatic, Chung’s collection proves irresistible.”
Booklist (starred review)
Greta Jung narrates a collection of surreal fable-like stories translated from the original Korean. They hold a warped mirror up to contemporary life. From the first story, a bizarre and dark tone is set as a young woman is confronted and haunted by a horrific animated head that rises into her toilet from the sewers. None of the stories are similar, and Jung maintains the sense of strangeness as each examines the stomach-turning evils besetting contemporary life. Character voices are lively and dynamic, but occasionally Jung slips into an affectless narration when trying to capture the wry, witty authorial voice. The collection is unsettling but is written and narrated in an oddly engrossing way that makes it difficult to hit pause. J.M.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Greta Jung narrates a collection of surreal fable-like stories translated from the original Korean. They hold a warped mirror up to contemporary life. From the first story, a bizarre and dark tone is set as a young woman is confronted and haunted by a horrific animated head that rises into her toilet from the sewers. None of the stories are similar, and Jung maintains the sense of strangeness as each examines the stomach-turning evils besetting contemporary life. Character voices are lively and dynamic, but occasionally Jung slips into an affectless narration when trying to capture the wry, witty authorial voice. The collection is unsettling but is written and narrated in an oddly engrossing way that makes it difficult to hit pause. J.M.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-09-28
If the first story of a collection is meant to set the tone for the whole volume, then “The Head,” the opener to South Korean author Chung’s first work to be translated into English, is a doozy. A young woman is beset by a talking head in her toilet, made from, as the head tells the woman, “the things you dumped down the toilet, like your fallen-out hair and feces and toilet paper you used to wipe your behind.” No matter how the woman tries to silence or destroy the head, it grows and disrupts her life through courtship, marriage, and the birth of her daughter. If it seems surprising that an institution like the Booker Prize would go for gross-out body horror, one need only consider the deft social commentary that underpins Chung’s tales. In “The Embodiment,” for example, a single woman ends up pregnant from taking too much birth control medication and then is warned by her obstetrician that if she doesn’t find a father for her unborn child, the consequences could be dire. (Spoiler: They are.) Women’s bodies are literally disfigured by social expectations or cultural pressures; children are destroyed by the cruel whims of adults. Money, old age, technology, and intergenerational trauma ruin plenty of things here, too. In the title story, the family business—the making of cursed fetish objects—is passed down through the generations, with one particularly disastrous rabbit lamp wreaking havoc on its greedy recipient. 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.
