Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances.

Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.

"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." - Seattle Times

"A very welcome addition to existing works of Korean literature in English translation." - Acta Koreana

"It is a great pleasure to see this book added to the Weatherhead Books on Asia list." - Pacific Affairs

"Beyond Korean Studies... [this] book should also be read widely by scholars engaged in trauma studies." - Journal of Asian Studies

"A superb collection" - Tony's Reading List