Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Today on the pot, we've got author

Bora Chung. Her short story collection is called Curst Buddy, originally published in Korean.

It's now translated into English. The book is full of wild trips into different genres.

So I was surprised to learn that one of her stories is actually based on a true thing that

happened to her. She tells NPR's Aisha Roscoe about how one time when she was 28, she had this

medical issue where her period just would not stop. I'll let her tell the rest of it. But she

points out how cultural mores over motherhood and pregnancy got in the way of her ability to receive her own

health care, which strikes me as the perfect backdrop for a horror story.

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and visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. A girl whose brother feeds on her blood, robots that take

revenge on their owner, and a bunny lamp with a deadly curse. Those are some of the bizarre, twisted plot

lines in cursed bunny, Boruchung's first collection of short stories to appear in English,

which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It was translated from Korean by

Anton Her. Author Boruchung joins us now to talk about her

collection. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. So you've

described these stories as, quote, like a fairy tale, but with a little bit of a Korean twist. Can you talk about what that means? They definitely

felt like fairy tales to me. Fairy tales, um, usually the European ones that we are kind of used to in

the English speaking world has a certain way of plot development. And I really love that structure. So I try to use it

whenever it seems fun. And I add a Korean reality, the things that I see or the things that I

heard from somebody else. And with that kind of magical twist to it, and I hope

that adds some fresh elements to the familiar structure. One of your stories also deals with

...