Your Utopia by Bora Chung, skillfully translated from Korean by Anton Hur, is an original and engaging collection of eight stories. Because they are set in the future, the book is probably shelved with science fiction, but it could also fit under the horror and or the fantasy umbrella.
On the basis of Your Utopia Chung sees a bleak future for humanity. In "The End of the Voyage" a single human remains after a mysterious plague has wiped out every other person. People infected by the plague show no symptoms until, uncontrollably, they start to eat another person.(I'm hardly spoiling the story by telling you this because Chung herself tells you this in the first two pages. We enjoy the story by seeing how Chung is able to reach those pages.)
In "The Center for Immorality Research" a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a gala for donors only to be blamed for the chaos that results during the event in front of the mysterious celebrity benefactors who hope to live forever.
In "A Song for Sleep," an AI elevator in an apartment complex develops a tender, one-sided love for an elderly resident.
And in "Seed" Earth's now-sentient plants who narrate the story have a fraught meeting with some of Earth's corporate workers. As the plants say."The future of our world would depend on this single and first encounter."
A world-wide plague of cannibals . . . an AI elevator . . . sentient, mobile trees—where does Chung get these things? Okay, Tolkin has ambulatory trees, but still. . . . Several of the stories have an O. Henry twist or revelation at the end, but this does not diminish the story's impact. Indeed, as in O. Henry, the final paragraph can throw the story into perspective.
She's written three novels and three collections of short stories. Cursed Bunny, her earlier collection of short stories, also translated into English by Anton Hur, was a National Book Award finalist and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She has taught Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. If you are interested in original ideas, Chung is someone to follow.