There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun

Ch'oe Yun; Translated by Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton

May, 2008
Cloth, 200 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14296-0
$24.50 / £14.50

"There a Petal Silently Falls, by one of contemporary South Korea's most respected authors, was an early attempt to confront the scandal of the Kwangju Massacre. Faced with censorship and a regime that denied the atrocities it had committed, Ch'oe Yun evokes in narrative form a trauma that defied narration. Today the vagaries of memory, rather than censorship, threaten to silence the history of Kwangju. May this most welcome of translations serve as a timely reminder of those events of spring 1980." — Janet Poole, assistant professor of East Asian studies, University of Toronto

"Haunting, painful and affirming, full of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically physical. . . . Everything about Yun's work is brilliant." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"These three stories are the work of a fiction writer of the very highest order." — Booklist (starred review)

"Ch'oe is a versatile writer who cloaks stark perceptions of individual and social trauma with elegant craft, poignant metaphor, and occasional, sardonic flashes of humor." — Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Seattle Times

"Winner of the prestigious Tongin and Yi Sang literary prizes, Ch'oe Yun has had more impact on the South Korean literary scene than any other contemporary woman writer. At once experimental, polyvocal, and politically engaged, the stories collected in There a Petal Silently Falls offer a rich, evocative exploration of violence, trauma, and loss in divided Korea. Ch'oe's stories take us well beyond previous literary representations of national division and the 1980 Kwangju Massacre by probing the relationship among desire, fantasy, and memory, all the while locating gender at the center of the making of history. There a Petal Silently Falls represents an invaluable contribution to Korean literature in translation." — Theodore Hughes, assistant professor of modern Korean literature, Columbia University

Related Subjects

• Asian History
• Asian Literature
• Fiction

Series

• Weatherhead Books on Asia

About the Author

Ch'oe Yun, in addition to being an award-winning author, is professor of French literature at S?gang University in Seoul, Korea, and has translated contemporary Korean fiction into French. She received the 1992 Tongin Literature Prize for "The Gray Snowman" and the 1994 Yi Sang Literature Prize for "The Last of Hanak'o." Translations of her works can be found in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. Her writings have also been translated into French and Spanish. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of the Korean women's anthologies Words of Farewell and Wayfarer and cotranslators with Marshall R. Pihl of Land of Exile. They have also translated contemporary Korean novels such as Hwang Sun-won's Trees on a Slope and Cho Se-hui's The Dwarf. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, cotranslator of A Ready-Made Life, coeditor of Modern Korean Fiction, feature editor of Seeing the Invisible, and associate editor for Korea of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature.

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