Patterns Of The Heart And Other Stories

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.

"Jay Neugeboren’s You Are My Heart is an object lesson in imaginative empathy and observational intelligence. His fiction for years now has had the courage to be quiet and careful and comprehensively humane, but it’s in no way slight. One of his great subjects has been the damage that even the most caring and thoughtful can inflict, and though these stories take place all over the world, they’re at heart about the difference between the America to which we aspire and the America in which we live." -Jim Shepard Jay Neugeboren is an award-winning short story writer who has been applauded as one of the most distinguished writers of our time. With this, his fourth collection of short stories, he returns to the form that earned him the reputation as a "master storyteller." From the secluded villages in the south of France, to the cattle crawl in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa, to the hard-knock adolescent streets of Brooklyn, Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle and comprise human relationships. In works that are as memorable, engrossing, and exciting as they are gorgeously crafted, Neugeboren delivers on his reputation as one of our pre-eminent American writers. Jay Neugeboren is the author of seventeen books, including two prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, Before My Life Began), two award-winning books of nonfiction (Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness), and three collections of award-winning stories. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Penguin Modern Stories. He is the only author to have won six consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. He lives in New York City.

This collection of sixteen short stories includes some of Edgar Allan Poe's most boundary-pushing and blood-chilling work. Selections range from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which launched the detective mystery genre, to "The Tell-Tale Heart," a Gothic classic about a murderer's overwhelming guilt. Discover tales of creatures that return from the dead, ghastly diseases that claim their victims within half an hour, and secret messages that lead to buried treasure. This curated compilation contains unabridged versions of the American author's finest tales; the short stories were originally published between 1832 and 1849.

Presents a collection of critical essays on Poe's novel, The tell-tale heart, arranged chronologically in the order of their original publication.

Studies principally concerned with the nature and source of Chaucerian comedy: 'There is much to profit by here. 'STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER

First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.