We were promised a future full of innovation, a tomorrow filled with sleek technologies that would whisk us far away from the most mundane aspects of our humanity. Technology has indeed gotten sleeker — so why do we seem so stubbornly the same? The wistful, emotionally unmoored protagonists of the Korean writer Bora Chung’s second story collection, YOUR UTOPIA: Stories (Algonquin Books, 241 pp., $18.99), translated by Anton Hur, do their best to navigate this quandary.
In one story, a low-level employee at the Center for Immortality Research organizes an anniversary party at the institution even as the question of her own immortality hovers in the background. In another, a highly contagious disease that causes cannibalism sweeps the planet, eventually reaching a spaceship where the government is working desperately to develop a cure. The epidemic is horrifying, but that doesn’t prevent Chung from finding humor in it. “Aside from the afflicted’s tendency to regard other people as food, they were completely normal,” she writes. “It was only when cannibalism was mentioned in conversation that they responded abnormally, most notably their uniform insistence that eating people did not kill the eaten.”
Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision, but what stands out about her fantastical tales is not how different they are from one another so much as how much remains the same. No matter the premise behind a story, jobs still suck, suffering is still the natural product of living under society’s thumb and not even looming threats, like the danger of being eaten, can keep people from adhering to familiar structures of authority.
All of this might sound grim, but Chung’s deft handling makes these fraught obediences and tender concerns feel powerfully human. In the title story, for instance, a sentient self-driving vehicle left on Earth after humans have fled the planet finds meaning in ferrying around a damaged robot. Though the vehicle is only a smart object, its experience is richly emotive and tinged by the paradoxical affects that circulate at the end of the world. “If I want to conserve energy during the sunless nights, I need to think less. But here I am in the dark, having thoughts about having fewer thoughts.” Same, bestie.
In his gutsy collection, BUGSY AND OTHER STORIES (Simon & Schuster, 206 pp., paperback, $16.99), Rafael Frumkin presents characters in untraditional situations who are threatened by internal and external forces as they strive to stake out a joyful place in the world.
In the title story, Bugsy, a college student struggling with repressed queer desire and debilitating depression, finds a sense of belonging by moving into a commune-like house of women who make sadomasochistic queer porn. There, one of the women, Stella, a versatile performer and committed polyamorist, unlocks Bugsy’s capacity for sexual exploration: “She tied me to the bed and made me wear a leather hood that blocked out all the light and let her lips hover above mine, breathing her Listerine-and-Mountain-Dew-and-cigarettes breath into my mouth, and then denied me kiss after kiss.” But when Stella decides that she no longer wants to be polyamorous and wants to be in a monogamous relationship with a guy named Cody instead, it sends Bugsy into a spiral of paranoid ideation.
Mental illness resurfaces in a story about a therapist experiencing a break of his own. He blacks out, slices up his arm and hallucinates that an aggressive Alex Trebek verbally abuses him. Meanwhile, he stubbornly continues to treat his patients, eventually showing up at one’s home to deliver an urgent, incomprehensible message that his empathetic patient interprets as a cry for help. In an affecting scene that calls into question the absolute authority of clinician over patient, she comforts him with lessons she has learned while in his care.
Frumkin renders focal points like crisis and desire with compelling fluidity: His characters navigate the complexities of self-discovery against the constantly shifting background of psychological slippage and the pressures of making a life worth living. For instance, a will-they-won’t-they story about the Twitch-playing celebrity e-girl Dina Valentine, who is in love with her best friend and roommate, Aubrey, keeps the reader on a knife’s edge about whether Dina’s attempts to prevent Aubrey from seeing her boyfriend will be successful, with the nature of Aubrey’s own desire a powerful opacity until the story’s end.
But the collection’s greatest strength is its way of unpacking its characters’ stuck moments and impasses through vivid gasps of insight, moments when we come into contact with the abundance of their inner life. For each of them, the obscure whole of their identity is beyond easy summarization — but as they grope their way through crises both existential and mundane, every moment feels bracingly true.
A small town in Indiana is the central protagonist of the lyrical, reflective stories in FLOAT UP, SING DOWN: Stories (Bloomsbury, 207 pp., $26.99). The collection — written by Laird Hunt, whose novel “Zorrie” was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2021 — is composed of 14 linked tales, each set in the same town (which is also the same town in “Zorrie”) and each delving deep into the interiority of a single character as events large and small percolate through the community.
On the surface, the stories are preoccupied with the quotidian events of daily life. Candy Wilson is making deviled eggs, but forgot to buy paprika. The teenagers Della Dorner and Sugar Henry practice kissing, and reward each other for their pleasures with slices of Kraft American cheese. Neighborhood boys shoot starlings out of a tree with BBs; Della’s grandfather Hank Dunn takes Sugar for a drive. But beneath these seemingly everyday actions pulse vivid minds that gnaw on old regrets, muse on unknown futures and travel the length of personal and communal history. Their days seem ordinary but they are dense with the matter of living.
If the constant fullness of these internal monologues can sometimes feel slightly monotonous, it doesn’t detract from the gratification of reading. The book unfolds similarly to a neighborhood cookout — you brush up against one charming moment, one charming character, and then move on to the next. In this way, Hunt’s characters reveal beguiling secrets and contradictions. In one story, a slacker schemer named Champ turns out to have had a promising aptitude for ballroom dancing when he was working as a janitor: “He took to it when the school emptied out. In his heavy work boots, in the half dark with the waltz records playing. … He added flourishes of his own. He liked the way his arm felt when it went rising up and up through the air. He liked it better than anything.”
In the process of learning what makes each character tick, what feels at first like a loosely linked collection grows revelatory, unearthing an ecology of elusive connection and meaning.
