Your Utopia (2024) by Bora Chung

Korean author Bora Chung

Book Review

Your Utopia (2023)

by Bora Chung

  I really enjoyed Cursed Bunny, the debut collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung, which was published in translation last year and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Translated Fiction.  I was eager to read Your Utopia, her new collection of short stories, particularly after I saw a stand up display(!) in the local Barnes & Noble- not a real huge supporter of translated literature in my experience.  

   Whereas Cursed Bunny seemed more like a collection themed around "body horror", Your Utopia feels more like an excursion into a world of post-human literature.  A couple of the stories feature robot/non-human narrators, and the longest is a zombie-spaceship cross-over situation.  I found the stories with non-human narrators to be the most interesting.   In one story, the narrator is an elevator looking after an elderly woman with Parkinson's, in another a Wall-E type robot wanders a planet deserted by their human "masters."  Everything moves along at a good clip, as you expect in a book of short stories, and I'm left wondering when and if Chung is going to publish a novel.

  I listened to half of Your Utopia as an Audiobook, and the other half I read on my Kindle.