The CEO of the rival company amasses a vast fortune through bribing and exploitation. The latter, an ethical and upright spirit distillery owner, is driven to suicide by a rival company’s smear campaign. In the eponymous short story, “Cursed Bunny”, a shaman creates a cursed artifact in the shape of a bunny-lamp to avenge the death of his friend. Chung’s unique blend of folklore, magical realism, horror and sci-fi utilizes genre-specific conventions for incisive social commentary to an unprecedented degree. This is no surprise as the Korean literary marketplace tends to strictly divide so-called “literary fiction” from “genre literature” like science fiction. Unlike other Booker-nominated Korean novels like Han Kang’s Vegetarian or Sang-young Park’s Love in the Big City, which were bestsellers in Korea before their English publication, Chung’s collection was published in 2017 and was met with a relatively quiet domestic reception. Chung’s first work to be published in English, Cursed Bunny is a collection of ten short stories that fluidly crosses genres. ISBN 9781643753607īora Chung’s Cursed Bunny created a minor sensation in the literary world when it was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize in Anton Hur’s translation. The Cursed Bunny, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur. My personal favorite sentence comes at the climax of “Snare”, when the man sees his son and notes “Oozing out of the long wound was a familiar glob of gold-colored liquid.”Ĭhung, Bora.

Cursed bunny genre