NPR / January 30, 2024

As concepts go, "utopia" is a spectacularly Janus-faced one. The word itself is encrusted with opposing meanings, signifying both an ideal place and no place. Every utopia also encodes a dystopia; an imagined ideal defines itself against antipodean values, lightness against darkness. Korean writer Bora Chung thoroughly embraces the term's quirk of contradiction in her new story collection Your Utopia. Working again with Anton Hur, who translated her first story collection Cursed Bunny into English, Chung now scares up scenarios set in both the near past and near future. 

Chicago review of books / February 01, 2024

Bora Chung takes readers on a journey to the unexpected in her latest short story collection, Your Utopia. In her 2022 collection, Cursed Bunny, Chung showed us many types of monsters in stories ranging in varying degrees from speculative fiction to supernatural to horror. In Your Utopia, the narratives are decidedly more science fiction than fantasy, and while there are still monsters, they take a backseat to internalized conflicts and the faults inherent in humanity. 

The New Indian Express / February 22, 2024

There’s an introduction with all the background, then there’s the present, which she immerses the readers in with her fantastic imagination, before pushing them off a cliff and into the depths of uncomfortable and unbelievable truths.

The Guardian / March 29, 2024

Korean writer Chung’s previous book Cursed Bunny, which was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, took horror and fantasy as its inspiration; in this collection of stories the driver is science fiction, with a good dose of absurdity. An institute researching immortality celebrates its anniversary, but gets bogged down in the design of the invitations. A pandemic causes people to become cannibals, so a spaceship is sent away from Earth with uninfected people. “Do you know how to land this thing?” One story is narrated by an internet-connected lift, which can’t understand why humans don’t get their parts replaced as they age. Beneath the weirdness are serious points being made about acceptance of change and fear of obsolescence – as well as lots of entertainment. “The world is full of strange people,” opens the final story – and most of them are in here.

Manila Bulletin / April 04, 2024

The Holy Week's long weekend is officially here. If you're looking for books to read to catch up on that reading habit you set this year, we've listed five books written by women. After all, we're still celebrating International Women's Month, with genres encompassing historical fiction and the dystopian era.

TH / April 19, 2024

Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. In this new offering, titled Your Utopia, and immaculately translated by Anton Hur, we meet a host of characters, some human, some decidedly not, all imbued with strong streaks of strangeness.