‘The Embodiment’, p.32 (Honford Star, 2021) If you want a normal child, you’ll do whatever it takes to find a father.” “You seem to be complacent because you can’t actually see the baby right now, but keep this up and you’ll really see what you’re doing to the baby. Rather than provide sympathetic advice, the doctor here has just one thing in mind for the young woman: For example, the book contains bizarre pieces like ‘The Head’, a slightly distasteful story in which a woman is tormented by a creature that keeps appearing in her toilet bowl, and ‘The Embodiment’, where a woman somehow gets pregnant just from taking the pill for too long. Cursed Bunny dances around from genre to genre, with the stories linked only by their quality and the need for a slight suspension of disbelief. If asked to describe Chung’s style, and the mood of her stories, I’d probably struggle, though. This one’s another beautiful physical product, with a bright, vivid cover and stunning design, and what’s inside is excellent, too – ten longish stories, each intriguing in its own way. The small publisher Honford Star, responsible for such books as Astral Season, Beastly Season, To the Warm Horizon and Tower, are about to release another of their Korean offerings in the form of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (translated by Anton Hur, review copy courtesy of the publisher).

Yes, it’s another new book by a female Korean writer, a set of stories, with a rather bleak feel, and many a twist besides.

Today’s choice is a work of another author being introduced to the Anglosphere, and, well, I think you can see where I’m going with this. Another common feature is a tendency for dark works, with the Korean fiction we get to experience often slightly, well, grim. For one thing, a lot of them have been by women, far more than you’d expect from the general gender ‘quota’ in translation (around 30%). Having read a fair bit of Korean literature over the past few years, I’ve noticed a couple of features of the more recent works that have made it into English.

Bunny cursed