Korean writer Ch’oe Myŏngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic. As Pyongyang transformed from Korea’s second city, peripheral to the Seoul-centered literary scene, into a socialist capital in the late 1940s, Ch’oe briefly ascended to the center of North Korean culture. Despite the vitality and originality of Ch’oe’s writing, Cold War politics and censorship, including South Korea’s anticommunist laws, consigned his work to obscurity. Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories presents a selection of Ch’oe’s short fiction in translation, including later works from hard-to-find North Korean publications. These cinematic, keenly observed tales explore Pyongyang in meticulous detail, depicting the city’s transformations and the conflicts between old and new. They pay close attention to the lives of the disaffected and the marginalized: a drifter confronts a former revolutionary dying of opium addiction; a sex worker is trafficked across the border aboard a train, amid the indifference of her fellow passengers. Later stories provide a striking glimpse of the Korean War—the occupation of Pyongyang, U.S. fighter jets bombing civilian refugees, guerrilla heroics—from a North Korean perspective. Hidden treasures of world literature, these stories offer new perspectives on Korea’s turbulent twentieth century, across political divides still in place today.

Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

The 14 stories in this collection display the often quiet, inconspicuous way in which terrible truths and experiences are intimated: the death of a sailboarder makes a widower see deeper into love and loss; a young poet visits his former teacher only to discover he is literally not the person he used to be; a middle-aged man glimpses the terrible humdrum of his third marriage as his son embarks on a new chapter in his life. Conveyed without grandeur or pathos, the revelations in these minimalist stories demonstrate clearly and effectively Fruelund’s gift of subtlety and nuance; like scenes from life, characters’ dramas are played out in brief but brilliant flashes. Ranging across the wide arc of human experience, from the comic to the tragic, each piece explores the complex emotions of the human heart.

Find freedom from life’s painful recurring patterns in 12 simple steps, with guided practices of self-compassion, mindfulness, and embodiment. Do you ever feel trapped by experiencing challenging feelings over and over again--sometimes without realizing it? Or do you find yourself thinking "Why is this happening to me again?" or "Why do I always feel this way?" You're not alone. With Heart Medicine, you can learn to identify your emotional and behavioral patterns through the lens of loving awareness--without self-judgment or blame, learning to hold yourself as you would a dear friend, with space and grace. Radhule Weininger draws on decades of experience as a therapist and meditation teacher to help readers understand the trauma behind their patterns, then offers twelve simple steps to work toward healing. Each chapter includes short practices so readers can begin to put the book's concepts to work for transformation in their own lives. With Heart Medicine you can finally be equipped with the tools to break through the patterns that hold you back and begin to live with more freedom, confidence, and peace. And that's good medicine, indeed.

Heart of Darkness is a short and vividly brutal account of colonial enterprise that has as much in common with the jaded Evelyn Waugh of Black Mischief as it does with any of Conrad's direct contemporaries in the late nineteenth century. It is accompanied in this volume by the tales with which it has been published since 1902, the autobiographical short story "Youth," and the less personal but more substantial tale of an old man's fall from fortune, "The End of the Tether." Though these stories differ considerably in style and content from his later novels, much of his reputation rests upon the words contained in this volume.