Starred review from December 18, 2023
Booker Prize–shortlisted Chung (Cursed Bunny) makes a dazzling return with these eight inventive tales. The collection opens with “The Center for Immortality Research,” which imagines bureaucracy, hierarchy, and capitalism continuing on for eternity. In “A Very Ordinary Marriage,” a man’s suspicions about his wife’s late night phone calls leads him down an uncanny rabbit hole. The standout title story examines a future in which artificial intelligence is all that remains on Earth. An autonomous vehicle travels aimlessly through this landscape, carrying a flawed humanoid robot that endlessly repeats variations of the same question—until a new variation of the question becomes a warning. Hur’s skillful translation feels authentic to Chung’s voice without an ounce of pandering to a potentially unaware Western audience. The author has an impressive ability to balance emotional and psychological depth with a touch of the surreal, creating a collection that resonates long after the final page is turned. A literary force to be reckoned with, Chung makes another splash. Agent: Jinhee Park, Greenbook Literary.
Starred review from January 1, 2024
Chung's anglophone debut, Cursed Bunny (2021), lost nothing in translation, thanks to the gifted Hur, landing the dynamic duo on the Booker International Prize and National Book Awards shortlists. Hur returns as Chung's brilliant Korean-to-English cipher for eight more enigmatically irresistible stories. "The Center for Immortality Research" features the company's "lowest of the low," who's tasked with planning the ninety-eighth anniversary party. Dystopic doom pervades "The End of the Voyage," in which the Disease makes vicious cannibals of its victims, while humans and plants evolve into symbiotic beings in order to survive nature's decimation in "Seed." A lone car, building, and robot are the only prescient beings left in "Your Utopia." A new resident's unexpected human touch inspires the elevator to sing in "A Song for Sleep." The violent memories of a criminal trapped in a coma get mined in "Maria, Gratia Plena." A local and an alien sent "to study the ecology of human beings" meet cute in a dentist's office in "A Very Ordinary Marriage." "To Meet Her," featuring an almost-120-year-old terrorist suspect, threads real-life protests, rallies, deaths, and pandemic masks and vaccines into a speculative mystery. Chung's electrifying author's note offers provenance for many of her stories and an empathic invitation to progress "toward a better world for both you and me."
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Starred review from February 1, 2024
Science fiction blends with pointed social critique in these short stories from South Korea. In 2022, Chung's first collection to appear in English, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. These eight stories pick up where that book left off, using darkly speculative premises--with surprising flashes of wry humor--to explore social ills. Where Chung's debut skewed toward fairy tale-infused horror, these stories are full of SF staples: spaceships, robots, futuristic technologies. In the opener, "The Center for Immortality Research," a low-level employee at the eponymous facility has to pull off a "ninety-eighth anniversary celebration." When things go awry, the worker is hit by the hard truth of their employer's mission. In "The End of the Voyage," a Department of Defense linguist on a space mission designed to outrun a cannibalistic virus on Earth discovers she has the world's worst co-workers. The title story is narrated by a piece of "inorganic intelligence," a solar-powered "autobody" whose human occupant has perished (along with the rest of his species) in a cataclysmic virus--viruses pop up numerous times in these tales; no surprise, given the book originally appeared in Korea in 2021--and who now faces a series of obstacles for its own survival. In the poignant "Maria, Gratia Plena," a worker scanning a comatose criminal's brain for memories discovers, instead of clues to her crimes, a haunting past. In an author's note, Chung says that "loss and trauma are the only common elements of human life," which explains the book's melancholy. But she also notes that the acts of imagining a utopia and mourning when it falls short are the first steps toward creating a better world. A big job for fiction; Chung's up to the task. The imagined worlds here may not be utopian--but the reading experience is.
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